Certain people, too--people like his mother,--hated divorce, believed it wicked. His mother still clung to the old faith. His mother would say: "God joined Aliette and Hector in holy matrimony. You have no right to sunder God's joining." As though humanity were any deity's stud-farm! CHAPTER IX 1 By that strange perversity which is peculiar to loving womanhood, Aliette's first thoughts--as the taxi rattled her away from Jermyn Street--were for her husband. For the second time in three years her mood relented. "Poor Hector!" she thought. "He'll be home when I get back. It isn't much of a home for him--ours." Yet, even relenting, she knew that she could never forgive. The physical Hector was dead, killed by her knowledge of his infidelities--as dead to her as the physical Ronnie was alive. Then she forgot Hector, remembered only Ronnie. Her memory thrilled to his caresses. She began to yearn for him with a bodily yearning so acute that--had he been beside her in the taxi--she would have thrown her arms round his neck. Her mind whirled. This way. That way. She, Aliette Brunton, who had always thought "that sort of thing" the prerogative of shop-girls and chorus-ladies, was yearning, physically, for a man. It was all wrong. She should never have gone to his rooms. They must part. She would never be parted from him. He ought never to have made love to her. She would have died if he had not made love to her! She tried to blame herself for her weakness; she tried to think: "I made no struggle. I yielded everything. I virtually threw myself at his head. I should have been strong. I should have denied him my hands, my lips." But her heart refused to be blamed; her heart said: "He loves you. You love him. Nothing else matters." The taxi swung into Bayswater Road; and instinctively Aliette opened her vanity-bag. Glancing at her face in the mirrored lid, she remembered Hector again. Hector mustn't see her as Ronnie had seen her. Hector mustn't find out! Once more, she felt abased. Once more her fastidiousness revolted--this time from concealment. The commonplace impulse--to confess--appeared, disappeared. What was there to confess? Nothing! Nevertheless, paying her driver, mounting the pillared door-step, ringing as she let herself into the square tessellated hall, Aliette felt guilty. In thought, if not in act, she was little better than the husband whom Lennard, appearing from his lower regions, announced to be in the library. Caroline Staley joined Lennard in the hall. Aliette handed her gloves, her bag and parasol to the maid; asked Lennard the time; heard it was a quarter past seven; hesitated the fraction of a second; and pushed open the library door.