She used to brood thus, a little at random, as she warily trod the streets behind that slim, carefully-dressed figure. She had become a strange perversion. She loved her husband still, in a headlong, fierce way. Yet she longed for him to commit himself, so that her love might puff away, become impalpable, like smoke rising in a clear sky. There was no chance for her, no freedom, no self-respect until she became callous, until that hot, wayward heart of hers was dammed up. She had read--in a girl’s superficial way--of first love as a potent thing. She hadn’t known then that it could be such a sweeping, crowning, involuntary thing--hadn’t dreamed that it could hold you in such grim, iron grasp. She couldn’t get away from the magnetism of--the first. She despised him; sometimes, for a clear moment, she loathed him. She remembered that on one occasion it had been a keen struggle to throw down the bread knife on the wooden platter instead of slitting it through his long lean throat. And yet! He had only to call the old playful, indulgent light into his lazy eyes, only to carelessly flip at her some gesture or word of the past, to bring her under his heel--quivering body, small subject soul. It was horrible to be in such bondage to a man--just because he had been first. Only because! One night near Holywell Street she saw him meet a woman. She followed them down the Strand, an odd, glad singing in her head. The moment had come. She studied that woman with a woman’s minute, critical eye. She wasn’t satisfied. The woman was respectable, obviously, insolently respectable. She looked like the mistress of a maid-of-all-work and a flawless little house. She hadn’t the right atmosphere. She took Edred’s arm, hanging on it stolidly and looking at other women on the pavements with a sort of virtuous sneer, seeming to say, “I have a perfect right; can any of you say as much?” They might have been an aggressively respectable married couple from South London going to dine at a restaurant by way of dissipation. As a matter of fact they turned in at one. Pamela watched Edred push back the heavy door and gravely stand aside for his companion to pass in first. There was no eagerness in his attitude; he seemed quite used to it, not exactly weary, but coldly stolid. He wore the settled air of a married man--the mild, contented, resigned air of doom, which so many husbands wear. He was neither unhappy nor happy; he took this evening meal in the crush and steam and the hurry of waiters as a matter of course. Why not? She didn’t pretend to understand him--or her. They were an odd couple. Nothing stealthy, illicit, ecstatic about them, when there should have been a suggestion of all three emotions!