“None whatever. There's every kind of complication. She must have always had something the matter with her, and if she'd been cared for and nursed when she was younger she might have pulled out of it. Instead of that she's always worn herself to a thread--you can see that. She isn't one of those who take life easily. She ought to have gone before this, but she holds on with her pluck and her love of it all.... Lord! when one thinks of the millions of people who just 'slug' through life--not valuing it, doing nothing with it--one grudges the waste of their hours when a woman like Miss Monogue could have done so much with them.” “Am I doing her any harm, going in to see her?” “No--doing her good. Don't excite her too much--otherwise the company's the best thing in the world for her.” The days then, were to be dedicated to her service. He knew, of course, that at the end of it--and the end could not be far distant--he would go to Scaw House and remain there; meanwhile the thing was postponed. He would not think about it. But on his second meeting with Norah Monogue he saw that he was not to be allowed to dismiss it. He found her sitting still by her window; she was flushed now with a little colour, her eyes burning with a more determined fire than ever, her whole body expressing a dauntless energy. The sight of her showed him that there was to be battle and, strangely enough, he found that there was something in himself that almost welcomed it. Before he knew where he was he found that he was “out” to defend his whole life. The first thing that she did was to draw from him a minute, particular account of all that had happened during these last months. It developed into a defence of his whole married life, as though he had been pleading before a jury of Clare's friends and must fight to prove himself no blackguard. “Ah! don't I know that I've made a mess of it all? Do you think that I'm proud of myself?” he pleaded with her. “Honestly I cannot see where, as far as Clare is concerned, I'm to blame. She didn't understand--how could she ever have understood?--the way that my work mattered to me. I wanted to keep it and I wanted to keep her too, and every time I tried to keep her it got in the way and every time I tried to keep it she got in the way. I wasn't clever enough to run both together.” Norah nodded her head.