After she had gone I began putting two and two together. What her visit did for me especially was to distract my mind. I got a better perspective on my own small drama in seeing it as incidental to a larger one. That there was a large one here I had no doubt, though I could neither seize nor outline its proportions. As far as I could judge of my visitor I found her dazed by the magnitude of the thing that had happened to her, whatever that was. She was good and kind; she hadn't a thought that wasn't tender; normally she would have been the devoted, clinging type of wife I longed to be myself; and yet some one's passion, or some one's ambition, or both in collusion, had caught her like a bird in a net. It was perhaps because she was a woman and I was a woman and J. Howard was a man that my reactions concerned themselves chiefly with him. I thought of him throughout the afternoon. I began to get new views of him. I wondered if he knew of himself what I knew. I supposed he did. I supposed he must. He couldn't have been married two or three years to this sweet stricken creature without seeing that her heart wasn't his. Furthermore, he couldn't have beheld, as he and I had beheld that afternoon, the hand that went up palm outward, without divining a horror of his person that was more than a shrinking from his poor contorted eye. For love the contorted eye would have meant more love, since it would have been love with its cognate of pity; but not so that uplifted hand and that instinctive waving of him back. There was more than an involuntary repulsion in that, more than an instant of abhorrence. What there was he must have discovered, he must have tasted, from the minute he first took her in his arms. I was sorry for him. I could throw enough of the masculine into my imagination to know how he must adore a creature of such perfected charm. She was the sort of woman men would adore, especially the men whose ideal lies first of all in the physical. For them it would mean nothing that she lacked mentality, that the pendulum of her nature had only a limited swing; that she was as good as she looked would be enough, seeing that she looked like an angel straight out of heaven. In spite of poor J. Howard's kingly suavity I knew he must have minutes of sheer animal despair, of fierce and bitter suffering. Mrs. Rossiter spoke to me that evening with a suggestion of reprimand, which was letting me off easily. I was so sure of my dismissal, that when I returned to the house from the shore I expected some sort of _lettre de congé_; but I found nothing. I had had supper with Gladys and put her to bed when the maid brought me a message to say that Mrs. Rossiter would like me to come down and see her dress, as she was going out to dinner. I was admiring the dress, which was a new one, when she said, rather fretfully: "I wish you wouldn't talk like that to father. It upsets him so."