The situation, which he had accepted so obediently, had been more than a mere mortal man could endure. Especially in the terrible five minutes after dinner, before they settled for the evening, when each sat waiting to see if the other had anything to say. Sometimes Majendie would take up his book and Anne her work. She would sew, and sew, patient, persistent, in her tragic silence. And when he could bear it no longer, he would put down his book and go quietly away, to relieve the intolerable constraint that held her. Sometimes it was Anne who read, while he smoked and brooded. Then, in the warm, consenting stillness of the summer evenings (they were now in June), her presence seemed to fill the room; he was possessed by the sense of it; by the sound of her breathing; by the stirring of her body in the chair, or of her fingers on the pages of her book; and he would get up suddenly and leave her, dragging his passion from the sight of her. As he considered these things, many perplexities, many tendernesses, stirred in him and kept him still. Anne watched him from the other end of the table, and her thoughts debased him. He seemed to her disagreeably incommunicative, and she had found an ignoble explanation of his mood. There had been too much salt in the soup, and now there was something wrong with the salmon. He had not responded to her apology for these accidents, and she supposed that they had been enough to spoil his evening with her. She had come to consider him a creature grossly wedded to material things. "It's a pity you stayed," said she. "Mrs. Hannay would have given you a better dinner." He had nothing to say to so preposterous a charge. His eyes were fixed more than ever on his plate. She saw his face flush as he bowed his head in eating; she allowed her fancy to rest in its morbid abhorrence of the act, and in its suspicion of its grossness. She went on, lashed by her fancy. "I cannot understand your liking to go there so much, when you might go to the Eliotts or the Gardners. They're always asking you, and you haven't been near them for a year." "Well, you see, the Hannays let me do what I like. They don't bother me." "Do the Eliotts bother you?" "They bore me. Horribly." "And the Gardners?" "Sometimes--a little." "And Canon Wharton? No. I needn't ask." He laughed. "You needn't. _He_ bores me to extinction." "I'm sorry it is my friends who are so unfortunate." "It's your husband who's unfortunate. He is not an intellectual person. Nor a spiritual one, either, I'm afraid." He looked up. Anne had finished her morsel, and her fingers played irritably with the hand-bell at her side. Poor Majendie's abstraction had combined with his appetite to make him deplorably slow over his dinner. She still sat watching him, pure from appetite, in resignation that veiled her contempt of the male hunger so incomprehensibly prolonged. He had come to dread more than anything those attentive, sacrificial eyes.