He became suddenly still. But his eyes were active with hate. She glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door. “I will send a telegram,” she said, and left him still malignant. She closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards her own room.... §10 She had to be patient. She had to be patient. This sort of thing had to go on from crisis to crisis. It might go on for years. She could see no remedy and no escape. What else was there to do but be patient? It was all amazing unjust, but to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside justice. It is autocracy. She had once imagined otherwise, and most of her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. She had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation. She sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised for her. She rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. But what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous and acquisitive men? She drew the telegram form towards her. She was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring Crappen headlong—to disinherit her absolutely. And—it suddenly struck her—her husband had trusted her to write it. She was going to do what he had trusted her to do.... But it was absurd. She sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amusement upon her lips. It was absurd—and everything was absurd. What more was to be said or thought about it? This was the lot of woman. She had made her struggle, rebelled her little bit of rebellion. Most other women no doubt had done as much. It made no difference in the long run. But it was hard to give up the hostels. She had been foolish of course, but she had not let them make her feel _real_. And she wasn’t real. She was a wife—just _this_.... She sighed and bestirred herself and began to write. Then abruptly she stopped writing. For three years her excuse for standing—everything, had been these hostels. If now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at her husband’s death she was to be stripped of every possession and left a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she should go on standing anything any more? Away there in England was Mr. Brumley, _her_ man, ready with service and devotion.... It was a profoundly comforting thing to think of him there as hers. He was hers. He’d given so much and on the whole so well. If at last she were to go to him....