It really amounted to playing a game, and if Fred would consent to play it with her it would be the greatest fun; but then he wouldn’t. He had the greatest horror of emotional scenes, and was always sternly practical with advice about hot-water bottles and not sitting in a draught. He did not, she told herself a hundred times a day, understand her moods in the least. He had never let her help him the least little bit in his work, he shut her out; she tossed her head at the stars, gathered her blue dress about her, and went up to bed. The bedroom seemed enormous, and the shaded electric light left caverns and spaces of darkness; the enormous bed in the middle of the room seemed without end or boundary. She heard her husband in the dressing-room, and she sat down in front of her glass with a sigh. “You can go, Ferris,” she said to her maid, “I’ll manage for myself to-night.” She began to brush her hair; she was angry with the things in the room, everything was so civilised and respectable. The silver on the dressing-table, a blue pincushion, the looking-glass; the blue dress, hanging over the back of a chair, seemed in its reflexion to trail endlessly along the floor. She brushed her hair furiously; it was very beautiful hair, and she wondered whether Fred had ever noticed how beautiful it was. Oh, yes! he’d noticed it in the early days; she remembered how he had stroked it and what nice things he had said. Ah! those early days had been worth having! How exciting they had been! Her heart beat now at the remembrance of them. She heard the door of the dressing-room close, and Fred came in. He yawned; she glanced up. He was a little shrimp of a man certainly, but he looked rather nice in his blue pyjamas. He was brown, and his grey eyes were very attractive. Although she did not know it, she loved every inch of him from the top of his head to the sole of his foot, but, just now, she wanted something that he had decided, long ago, was bad for her. He had made what he would have called a complete study of her nervous system, treating her psychology as he would have treated the heroine of one of his own novels. He was quite used to her fits of sentiment and he knew that if he indulged her in the least the complaint was aggravated and she was, at once, highly strung and aggressively emotional. His own love for her was so profound and deep that this “billing and cooing” seemed a very unimportant and trivial affair, and he always put it down with a firm hand. They mustn’t be children any longer; they’d got past that kind of thing. There were scenes, of course, but it only lasted for a very short time, and then she was quite all right again. He never imagined her flinging herself into anyone else because he would not give her what she wanted. He was too sure of her affection for him.