Except for Mary O'Riordan and Mollie, Aliette possessed no intimates of her own sex. Common gossip, however, credited various women of her acquaintance with "lovers": some permanent, accepted as institutions by every one except the husband; some transitory of the season; most merest "tame-cats," fetch-and-carry men. Hector's wife wanted none of these. She wanted Ronnie--not an occasional Ronnie, not a clandestine Ronnie, neither a merely physical nor a merely platonic Ronnie: but Ronnie himself--all of Ronnie--Ronnie for her very own. Comprehension of this fact--it came to her with peculiar clarity one late afternoon at a crowded tea-fight in Mary O'Riordan's house off Park Lane--brought the woman up short by the head. She realized herself wholly in love--dangerously, perilously, passionately in love. And the realization frightened her. It meant the abandoning of her own fixed point of view. It meant, actually, if not by intention, sin. At least it ought to mean "sin"--only somehow she could no longer regard it in that light. If she had not thought of Mary as sinful, why should she apply a different standard to her own case? If this immense new tenderness in her, this accentuation of all her femininity, was "sin"--then nature's self must be sinful. If, by religion, she belonged body and soul to Hector, forever and ever amen; if, in the sight of God, his infidelities counted for nothing; if his occasional desire to possess her (only the night before she had been subtly aware of that desire's recrudescence) constituted a lifelong claim--then religion, as she had so far understood religion, must be a mere code designed in the interest of husbands, and God Himself a mere male. 2 Meanwhile, to Ronnie's mind, the problem presented itself differently. Having no formal religion, the aspect of "sin" did not trouble him. He came, as he imagined in those ten days, to regard the entire question from a legal point of view. He wanted a woman who belonged to somebody else; by no manner of means could he possess that woman unless the law set her free. Her freedom being outside the sphere of practical politics, one's duty was self-control, forgetfulness. On the question of self-control there could be no compromise; but to forget Aliette was a tough job. Mere passion--since their last meeting--represented only the tiniest fraction of his feelings. Already she had given him an entirely new outlook--the lover's outlook: so that he caught himself regarding the faces of his fellows, faces in his club, at the courts, in the streets, on tubes and in omnibuses, solely from his own obsessed point of view. What secret, what _emotional_ secret, concealed itself behind those unemotional English faces? What sentimental impulse goaded them about town?