The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate and shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and the trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman, took (it seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a housekeeper second, taking from Ada’s shoulders the burden of engaging her underling. She had two “At homes” a week, and went to other people’s “At homes.” On Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new clothes to a larger audience than at the largest private “at home.” She killed the evenings somehow, in company with a friend, or with the fashion papers. Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often, but not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because he never asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business acquaintance, and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain him. Usually, he read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something which made no demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She was very quiet with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say. She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this was because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed to deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect happiness. The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her shoulders. Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut dresses, but not Ada. It wasn’t modest. Her shoulders were ugly. She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman, and she let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he deplored his weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler’s child is the worst shod, and something analogous often happens with the daughters of the clergy: Ada was, perhaps, the worst of Peter’s flock. He knew and, knowing the hopes he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure, but silently, confessing impotence. There were always books in which he could forget, and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left it. It is not easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack had been, humanly speaking, unpardonable. “There must be something in her,” he told himself, as he left the office, “and I’ve to find it.” The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter in his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could make a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his ghostly counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing for the seat. “Oh,” Ada greeted him, “I thought you were not coming back till Saturday.”