"How dare you? how dare you?" cried Dora, catching her breath hysterically. "It’s my right, it’s my due, to go where I like and do as I choose. I won’t be shut out of your life like this. You owe everything to me, and this is your gratitude. Taorna—who cares twopence-halfpenny about Taorna and what’s done there? If I hadn’t pleaded with and begged my father to give you some place in the Ministry, do you think you’d be there now? If you hadn’t married me you would have been nowhere and done nothing. And what have I gained through marriage with you? I was happier before. People loved me and admired me. You never give me a word of love or admiration. You go out with me—yes, because you’ve got to; because it’s to your advantage to show me off at parties. But you never even notice my new gowns; you never even take the trouble to pay me one of the compliments I was surfeited with, till I met you. I might be—why, I might be just like anybody else the way you treat me; not a woman of importance, a woman with wealth and charm, and all the rest of it—who expects to hear a trumpery secret now and again, as her right, and is grudged even that." She stopped for want of breath, and caught at the table for support. Farquharson leant back in his chair and looked at her critically. He was very pale. "Three minutes by the clock, my dear Dora. There’s a prize given at Dunmow annually to the woman who talks longer and faster than any other in the competition. It doesn’t matter what nonsense she talks. You would do well to enter for it. I believe it comes off in July." Dora turned suddenly and confronted him. He looked at her as at a stranger. He had had little experience of hysterical women; the outward signs of his mother’s conflicts with self had been so sternly repressed that it was only lately that he had guessed how often that rigid figure quailed under the strain of its inward wounds. No other woman had come into his life as more than a momentary pastime till he met Evelyn. The sight of his wife’s short, stricken figure roused no pity in him, only disgust. He had had no very high ideal of women in childhood; that he should have linked himself to a woman whose motives were so mean, one who, having no real interest in the cause, could seek to degrade her husband’s honour for the mere sake of satisfying personal curiosity, of flaunting her knowledge in the eyes of others, roused his disgust and shame. He put his watch down on the table. "In five minutes I shall expect you to leave the room," he said. "If you haven’t withdrawn by then I shall ring for your maid. In any case I should advise you to send for her. You aren’t yourself. I think even the glass in my dressing-room would fail to satisfy you as to your appearance at the present moment." His cigarette case lay on the table; he reached his hand out for it, but paused midway. Dora sprang at him, her eyes blazing. She clutched his arm in her grasp, almost like a mad woman.