distinctly if you can--you're supposed to be an educated woman,
aren't you?"

Poor Laura had been looking forward to her drive. She had taken
some innocent pleasure in choosing the prettiest of her morning
dresses, a gingham that fell into soft folds the colour of a
periwinkle, and in rearranging the liberty scarf on her drooping
gipsy straw, and in putting on her long fringed gauntlets and
little country shoes. Her husband's compliments made her wince,
Jack Bendish had eyes only for his wife, Val Stafford's
admiration was sweet but indiscriminate: but she remembered
Lawrence as a connoisseur. And worse than the sting of her own
small disappointment were the breaking of her promise to
Lawrence, the failure in hospitality, in common courtesy.

And for the thousandth time Laura wondered whether it would not
have been better for Bernard, in the long run, to defy his
senseless tyranny. He was at her mercy: it would have been easy
to defy him. Easy, but how cruel! A trained nurse would have
made short work of Bernard's whims, he would have been washed and
brushed and fed and exercised and disregarded--till he died
under it? Perhaps. It was safer at all events to let him go
his own way. He could never hope to command his regiment now:
let him get what satisfaction he could out of commanding his
wife! She would have preferred a form of sacrifice which looked
less like fear, but there was little sentiment in Bernard, and
love must not pick and choose. For it was love still, the old
inexplicable fascination: in the middle of one of his tirades,
when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the
contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on