He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp. A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand in an obedient attitude, and a woman--was she siren or angel?--was bathing an ugly wound. CHAPTER XIV AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done before--to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength, his animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction. She had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without her sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz in a different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the angel. It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily, most surely, by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had sought to rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She had not gone very far, it is true, but her methods had been common, ordinary. She had undervalued Fritz’s nature. That was what she felt now. He had behaved badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed in her very much. She resolved to make his belief more intense. An expression on his face--only that--had wrought a vital change in her feeling towards him, her conception of him. She ranged him henceforth with Sir Donald, with Robin Pierce. He stood among the believers in the angel. She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly. There was strength in Lady Holme’s character, and not merely strength of temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute, persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in the mud. Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied, yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a light cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated. He felt a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes in the presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of himself, now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and then, to think of man as the inferior of woman--in certain ways. Such a state of mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares at its toes, with round amazement, inwardly saying, “Is this phenomenon part of me?” There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him--as one lifted and dropped--a step below her. He pulled his bronze moustache over it with vigour.