It was curious: for the first time she realized that, in thinking back over the years since she had been parted from Anne, she seldom, nowadays, went farther than the episode with Chris. Yet it was long before--it was eighteen years ago--that she had “lost” Anne: “lost” was the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies The Amiable Ones), because a mother couldn’t confess, even to her most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her child. Yet that was what she had done; and now her thoughts, shrinking and shivering, were being forced back upon the fact. She had left Anne when Anne was a baby of three; left her with a dreadful pang, a rending of the inmost fibres, and yet a sense of unutterable relief, because to do so was to escape from the oppression of her married life, the thick atmosphere of self-approval and unperceivingness which emanated from John Clephane like coal-gas from a leaking furnace. So she had put it at the time--so, in her closest soul-scrutiny, she had to put it still. “I couldn’t breathe--” that was all she had to say in her own defence. She had said it first--more’s the pity--to Hylton Davies; with the result that two months later she was on his yacht, headed for the West Indies.... And even then she couldn’t breathe any better; not after the first week or two. The asphyxiation was of a different kind, that was all. It was a year later that she wrote to her husband. There was no answer: she wrote again. “At any rate, let me see Anne.... I can’t live without Anne.... I’ll go and live with her anywhere you decide....” Again no answer.... She wrote to her mother-in-law, and Mrs. Clephane’s lawyer sent the letter back unopened. She wrote, in her madness, to the child’s nurse, and got a reply from the same legal firm, requesting her to cease to annoy her husband’s family. She ceased.