Anne's lips turned white, but their muscles never moved. And the woman who watched her wondered in what circumstances Mrs. Majendie would display emotion, if she did not display it now. "What right have you to say these things to me?" "I've a right to say a good deal more. Your husband was very fond of me. He would have married me if his friends hadn't come and bullied me to give him up for the good of his morals. I loved him--" She suggested by an adroit shrug of her shoulders that her love was a thing that Mrs. Majendie could either take for granted or ignore. She didn't expect her to understand it--"And I gave him up. I'm not a cold-blooded woman; and it was pretty hard for me. But I did it. And" (she faced her) "what was the good of it? Which of us has been the best for his morals? You or me? He lived with me two years, and he married you, and everybody said how virtuous and proper he was. Well, he's been married to you for nine years, and he's been living with another woman for the last three." She had not meant to say it; for (in the presence of the social sanctities) you do not say these things. But flesh and blood are stronger than all the social sanctities; and flesh and blood had risen and claimed their old dominion over Sarah. The unspeakable depths in her had been stirred by her vision of the things that might have been. She was filled with a passionate hatred of the purity which had captured Majendie, and drawn him from her, and made her seem vile in his sight. She rejoiced in her power to crush it, to confront it with the proof of its own futility. "I do not believe it," said Mrs. Majendie. "Of course you don't believe it. You're a good woman." She shook her meditative head. "The sort of woman who can live with a man for nine years without seeing what he's like. If you'd understood your husband as well as I do, you'd have known that he couldn't run his life on your lines for six months, let alone nine years." Mrs. Majendie's chin rose, as if she were lifting her face above the reach of the hand that had tried to strike it. Her voice throbbed on one deep monotonous note. "I do not believe a word of what you say. And I cannot think what your motive is in saying it." "Don't worry about my motive. It ought to be pretty clear. Let me tell you--you can bring your husband back to-morrow, and you can keep him to the end of time, if you choose, Mrs. Majendie. Or you can lose him altogether. And you will, if you go on as you're doing. If I were you, I should make up my mind whether it's good enough. I shouldn't think it was, myself." Mrs. Majendie was silent. She tried to think of some word that would end the intolerable interview. Her lips parted to speak, but her thoughts died in her brain unborn. She felt her face turning white under the woman's face; it hypnotised her; it held her dumb.