Mr. Willis Rodman scarcely relished the process which deprived him of his town house and of the greater part of his means, but his exasperation happily did not seek vent for itself in cruelty to his wife. It might very well have done so, would all but certainly, had not Alice appealed to his sense of humour by her zeal in espousing his cause against her brother. That he could turn her round his finger was an old experience, but to see her spring so actively to arms on his behalf, when he was conscious that she had every excuse for detesting him, and even abandoning him, struck him as a highly comical instance of his power over women, a power on which he had always prided himself. He could not even explain it as self-interest in her; numberless things proved the contrary. Alice was still his slave, though he had not given himself the slightest trouble to preserve even her respect. He had shown himself to her freely as he was, jocosely cynical on everything that women prize, brutal when he chose to give way to his temper, faithless on principle, selfish to the core; perhaps the secret of the fascination he exercised over her was his very ingenuousness, his boldness in defying fortune, his clever grasp of circumstances. She said to him one day, when he had been telling her that as likely as not she might have to take in washing or set up a sewing-machine: ‘I am not afraid. You can always get money. There’s nothing you can’t do.’ He laughed. ‘That may be true. But how if I disappear some day and leave you to take care of yourself?’ He had often threatened this in his genial way, and it never failed to blanch her cheeks. ‘If you do that,’ she said, ‘I shall kill myself.’ At which he laughed yet more loudly. In her house at Wimbledon she perished of _ennui_, for she was as lonely as Adela in Holloway. Much lonelier; she had no resources in herself. Rodman was away all day in London, and very often he did not return at night; when the latter was the case, Alice cried miserably in her bed for hours, so that the next morning her face was like that of a wax doll that has suffered ill-usage. She had an endless supply of novels, and day after day bent over them till her head ached. Poor Princess! She had had her own romance, in its way brilliant and strange enough, but only the rags of it were left. She clung to them, she hoped against hope that they would yet recover their gloss and shimmer. If only he would not so neglect her! All else affected her but little now that she really knew what it meant to see her husband utterly careless, not to be held by any pettings or entreaties. She heard through him of her brother ‘Arry’s disgrace; it scarcely touched her. Her brother Richard she was never tired of railing against, railed so much, indeed, that it showed she by no means hated him as much as she declared. But nothing would have mattered if only her husband had cared for her.