"I'm awfully sorry," he said, "to keep you waiting." She rang the bell. "Will you have the lamp lit in the drawing-room or the study?" He looked at her. There was no lamp for him in her eyes. "Whichever you like. I think I shall go over to the Hannays', after all." He went; and by the lamp in the drawing-room Anne sat and brooded in her turn. She said to herself: "It's no use my trying to keep him from them. It only irritates him. He lets me see plainly that he prefers their society to mine. I don't wonder. They can flatter him and kow-tow to him, and I cannot. He can be a little god to them; and he must know what he is to me. We haven't a thought in common--not a feeling--and he cannot bear to feel himself inferior. As for me--if I've married beneath me, I must pay the penalty." But there was no penalty for her in these reflections. They satisfied her. They were part of the curious mental process by which she justified herself. CHAPTER XXIII Up to that moment when he had looked across the dinner table at Anne, Majendie had felt secure in the bonds of his marriage. Anne's repugnance had broken the natural tie; but up to that moment he had never doubted that the immaterial link still held. If at times her presence was a bodily torment, at other times he felt it as a spiritual protection. His immense charity made allowance for all the extraordinary attitudes of Anne. In his imagination they reduced themselves to one, the attitude of inscrutable physical repugnance. He had accepted (as he had told himself so often) the situation she had created. It appeared to him, of all situations, the crudest and most simple. It had its merciful limits. The discomfort of it, once vague, had grown, to his thwarted senses, almost brutally defined. He could at least say, "It was here the trouble began, and here, therefore, it shall end." He thought he had sounded the depths of her repugnance, and could measure by it his own misery. He said, "At any rate I know where I am"; and he believed that if he stayed where he was, if he respected his wife's prejudices, her prejudices would be bound to respect him. He could not make her love him, but at least he considered that he had justified his claim to her respect. And now she had opened his eyes, and he had looked at her, and seen things that had not (till that moment) come into his vision of their separation. He saw subtler hostilities, incurable, indestructible repugnances, attitudes at which his charity stood aghast. The situation (so far from being crude and simple) involved endless refinements and complexities of torture. He despaired now of ever reaching her. Majendie had caught his first clear sight of the spiritual ramparts. "I'm not good enough for her," he said. She had kept him with her that evening, not because she wanted him to stay, but because she wanted him to understand.