Yes, Susie was right about her John. There was no weak spot in him. He had not a great intellect, but he had a great heart and a great will. Aggie remembered how once, in her thoughtful maiden days, she had read in one of the vicar's books a saying which had struck her at the time, for the vicar had underlined it twice. "If there is aught spiritual in man, it is the Will." She had not thought of John as a very spiritual person. She had dimly divined in him the possibility of strong passions, such passions as make shipwreck of men's lives. And here was Arthur--he, poor dear, would never be shipwrecked, for he hadn't one strong passion in him; he had only a few weak little impulses, incessantly frustrating a will weaker than them all. She remembered how her little undeveloped soul, with its flutterings and strugglings after the immaterial, had been repelled by the large presence of the natural man. It had been afraid to trust itself to his strength, lest its wings should suffer for it. It had not been afraid to trust itself to Arthur; and his weakness had made it a wingless thing, dragged down by the suffering of her body. She said to herself, "If I had known John was like that--" She stopped her brain before it could answer for her! "You wouldn't be sitting here now stitching at that coat." She stitched on till she could see to stitch no more; for tears came and blinded her eyes, and fell upon the coat. That was just after she had kissed it. X It was Easter, three weeks after Susie's visit; and Arthur was going away for a fortnight, his first real holiday in seven years. For some time he had been lengthening out his office hours, and increasing his salary, by adding night to day. And now he had worn himself out by his own ferocious industry. He knew, and Aggie knew, that he was in for a bad illness if he didn't get away, and at once. He had written in his extremity to a bachelor brother, known in the little house at Camden Town as the Mammon of Unrighteousness. The brother had a big house down in Kent; and into that house, though it was the house of Mammon, Arthur proposed that he should be received for a week or two. He took care to mention, casually, and by way of a jest after the brother's own heart, that for those weeks he, Arthur, would be a lonely widower.