I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my husband intercepted me.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said, catching at my wrist.  “Think of the servants.  Think what they’d say.  Think what the whole island would say.  Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?”

I returned and sat by the table.  My husband lit another cigarette.  Nervously flicking the ends off with the index finger of his left hand, and speaking quickly, as if the words scorched his lips, he told me I was mistaken if I supposed that he wanted a scene like this.  He thought he could spend his time better.  I was equally mistaken if I imagined that he had desired our marriage at all.  Something quite different might have happened if he could have afforded to please himself.

He had made sacrifices to marry me, too.  Perhaps I had not thought of that, but did I suppose a man of his class wanted a person like my father for his father-in-law.  And then my Aunt and my cousins—­ugh!

The Bishop, too!  Was it nothing that a man had been compelled to make all those ridiculous declarations?  Children to be brought up Catholics!  Wife not to be influenced!  Even to keep an open mind himself to all the muss and mummery of the Church!

It wasn’t over either.  That seedy old “saint” was probably my confessor.  Did any rational man want another man to come between him and his wife—­knowing all he did and said, and everything about him?

I was heart-sick as I listened to all this.  Apparently the moral of it was that if I had been allowed to marry without being instructed in the first conditions of married life my husband had suffered a gross and shocking injustice.

The disgust I felt was choking me.  It was horribly humiliating and degrading to see my marriage from my husband’s point of view, and when I remembered that I was bound fast to the man who talked to me like this, and that he could claim rights in me, to-night, to-morrow, as long as I lived, until death parted us, a wild impulse of impotent anger at everybody and everything made me drop my head on to the table and burst into tears.

My husband misunderstood this, as he misunderstood everything.  Taking my crying for the last remnant of my resistance he put his arms round my shoulders again and renewed his fondling.

“Come, don’t let us have any more conjugal scenes,” he said.  “The people of the hotel will hear us presently, and there will be all sorts of ridiculous rumours.  If your family are rather common people you are a different pair of shoes altogether.”

He was laughing again, kissing my neck (in spite of my shuddering) and saying: 

“You really please me very much, you do indeed, and if they’ve kept you in ignorance, what matter?  Come now, my sweet little woman, we’ll soon repair that.”

I could bear no more.  I must speak and I did.  Leaping up and facing round on him I told him my side of the story—­how I had been married against my will, and had not wanted him any more than he had wanted me; how all my objections had been overruled, all my compunctions borne down; how everybody had been in a conspiracy to compel me, and I had been bought and sold like a slave.