Marianne went back into her parlour and rang the bell for Elizabeth Barclay to come and take away the tea-things, because Harmood was out for her holiday. She looked and felt flushed and irritated, but could not have said whether it was with Charlotte Eldridge, with herself, or with this showy girl at Royd. With all her stupidity--and she had plenty--she was not wanting in loyalty to her husband; although it may be a good deal of this loyalty was only a form "proper pride"--that is to say, _amour propre_--took. How one wonders that commonplace, uninteresting people should have any _amour propre_--should love those insipid selves of theirs at all! But they have it--the dullest of them. As she sat there in the growing dusk, watching the slow-combustion stove economizing its coal, and making attempts to consume its own smoke, her soul was doing battle on its own behalf against the insidious siren Jealousy, who came and came and came again each time she thrust her contemptuously away. Had she, perhaps, despised her a little too roundly when her first whispers were audible? Had she treated them too much as an absurdity when her husband's first great success had been followed by a sudden uplifting of him into a world she resented--resented because the only part she could play in it had been a very minor one? Had she taken it too easily for granted that no harm would come if he went his way and she hers--she, who didn't mean to be patronized, whoever else did! Might it not have been really wiser to brace herself up to the bearing of one or two slights and humiliations, to laugh them off and acknowledge that a homely, uneducated woman of her sort must needs fall contentedly into a back rank, rather than to refuse indignantly to march with the army at all? _She_ was not going to be tolerated, and made allowances for, not she!--that was her attitude. That Arkroyd woman would have been just civil to her in time, no doubt; but how about all the affronts and indignities she would have had to put up with during apprenticeship? No--it was best as it was: Titus to go his way and she hers! Besides, her being constantly hatching him would do no good, if there _were_--that is to say, if there _had been_--any truth in this nonsense of Charlotte's. But, really, it was all so idiotic. As if she couldn't trust Titus for five minutes away from her apron-strings! Of course, Titus was to be trusted!... Was he?