She almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this crude presentment of a new idea. Then she rose, lit a candle and walked out of her room, and across a landing, and straight into Mortimer’s room. She softly approached the bed on which he lay, and, like Psyche over again, held the light up on high, and looked critically down upon her sleeping husband. She felt an indefinable pleasure in thus surveying him helpless who was technically her master. This coarse, clumsy-fibred creature who had yet his full complement of the shrewdness and acuteness that gave him dominion over his fellow-men, and made him known as a “tough customer” in business, slept the sleep--well, if not precisely that of the just, at any rate that of the man whose balance at his bank is secure and his investment sound. He slept like a savage who has laid aside his clubs, and enjoys the dreamless, primitive sleep that he has earned by his feats of arms. His thick, broad eyelids rested peacefully on the cold, blue eyes whose empty glare his wife knew and detested. His lips were closed on his cruel little teeth in a firm, inexpressive line, pacific and meaningless, and his clumsy hands, with their short, square-nailed finger tips, lay palm outwards on the coverlet, as innocently as a child’s. She might stare at him as long as she pleased, with those burning, insistent eyes of hers, and not fear to break his sleep; his simple nervous system would surely withstand the hypnotism of her enquiring gaze. But next morning, he would be “all there” as usual; the hectoring, bantering, exacerbating personality would re-assert itself, and make its hundred and one demands on her self-control all through the day, till sometimes it seemed as if she could not look at him or hear his voice without screaming. “Why should I bear it? Why should I?” she asked herself, passionately, aloud; and the pettish exclamation was significant of the great revulsion that was taking place in her, a result of the passionate, elucidating fortnight she had passed. She went back to her room and lay down again, but she closed her eyes no more that night, and by the time the pallid dawn of Newcastle had begun to filter through the window curtains, a whole plan of action had shaped itself in her mind. She came down punctually to the eight o’clock breakfast which was exacted by Mortimer and which he had never allowed her to forego, putting some constraint on herself to appear perfectly composed, for her heart was beating violently, and she felt the suspicious flush mounting to her cheek, which had so often given unkind friends occasion to say that she painted. But Mrs. Poynder, who was presiding over the tea and coffee, looked her over with some approval. “Now, that’s the first decent dress I have seen you in, Fibby, for many a long day!” she observed, contemplating the plain dress of blue serge--not very new, not very smart--in which Mrs. Elles had chosen to array herself.