The matter between them touched the same as when, “I have a right to a home; the children have a right to a home,” Harry had said. But their tones not the same; in Harry’s voice a quality of dulness as of one reciting a lesson too often conned yet never understood; in hers a certain weariness as with instruction too often given. They had been talking a very long time. Harry hadn’t any arguments. He just kept coming back and coming back to the one thing. He said again, the twentieth time, in that dull voice, “We are responsible for the children. We have a duty towards them.” The twentieth time! She made a gesture, not impatient, just tired, that was of repletion with this thing. “Ah, you say ‘we’ have a duty. You say ‘we’; but, Harry, you mean me. Why I a duty more than you? Why am I the accused?” Harry’s dull note: “Because you are a woman.” Ineffable weariness was in the murmur that was her reply. “Ah, my God, that reason!” No, she had never anticipated this. CHAPTER V How did it happen? Within her face abode the explanation of how it happened. There was a mirage in her face. If she were taken (for a moment) when she had been married ten years, her age thirty-two, and then taken again when she was forty-six, when she had done, when, in 1922, she said, “I have done,” and her story ceases, it is material to a portrait of her that in those fourteen years her appearance did not greatly change. Events inscribed it; but these writings were in two scripts, rendered in the two natures that were hers, and, as it were, a balance was maintained between them; there remained constant the aspect that her face presented to the world; constant, that is to say, the spirit that looked out of her face. That girl that at the door of the great house in Pilchester Square had breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you,” had been called beautiful. This woman that now was wife and now was mother was beautiful with that girl’s beauty and with her own, matured of years, set upon it. That girl, shaded in her colouring, commonly was sombre in her hue, but with a quick, impetuous spirit beneath her flesh that, flashing, somehow lightened all her tints; this woman, albeit dark, had somehow about her a deep golden hue as of dusk in a deep wood beheld against a sunset. Her face had always had a boyish look and still, with years, was boyish. There was a mirage in her face. The stranger glanced and saw a mother--extraordinarily shielding and maternal and benignant things; and looked again and saw a boy--astonishingly reckless and impetuous and rather boyish, hard and mutinous things. Or glanced and saw a boy, perhaps laughing and eager, perhaps obstinate and petulant; and looked again and only much tenderness was there. There was a mirage in her face; and with its changes her voice changed. When she was a boy her voice was April; when she was a mother September was her voice.