‘You don’t understand women; you don’t know, you don’t understand,’ she murmured.  She was shocked and hurt by this candid and hostile expression of opinion concerning Rose and Milly, whom hitherto he had always appeared to like.

‘No,’ he retorted with solemn resentment.  ’And no other man either!...  Before, when they needed your protection perhaps, when your husband was alive, you would have left Rose and Milly then, wouldn’t you?...  Wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh!’ the exclamation escaped her unawares.  She burst into a sob.  She had not meant to cry, but she was crying.

He sat down close to her, and put his hand on her shoulder, and leaned over her.  ‘My dearest girl,’ he whispered in a new voice of infinite softness, ’you’ve forgotten that you have a duty to yourself, and to me, as well as to Rose and Milly.  Our lives want looking after, too.  We’re human creatures, you know, you and I. This row that we’re having now has occurred thousands of times before, but this time it’s going to be settled with common sense, isn’t it?’ And he kissed her with a kiss as soft as his voice.

She sighed.  Still perplexed and unconvinced, she was nevertheless in those minutes acutely happy.  The mysterious and profound affinity of the flesh had made a truce between the warring principles of the male and of the female; a truce only.  To the left of the house, over the Marsh, the last silver relics of day hung in the distant sky.  She looked at the dying light, so provocative of melancholy in its reluctance to depart, and at the timidly-appearing stars and the sombre trees, and her thought was:  ‘World, how beautiful and sad you are!’

Bran emerged forlorn from the gloom, and rested his great chin confidingly on her knees.

‘Bran!’ she condoled with him through her tears, stroking the dog’s head tenderly, ‘Ah!  Bran!’

Arthur stood up, resolute, victorious, but prudent and magnanimous too.  He put one foot on the seat beside her, and leaned forward on the raised knee, tapping his stick.  ‘I’ve hired a flat over there,’ he said low in her ear, ’such as can’t be gotten outside of New York.  And in my thoughts I’ve made a space for you in New York, where it’s life and no mistake, and where I’m known, and where my interests are.  And if you didn’t come I don’t know what I should do.  I tell you fair I don’t know what I should do.  And wouldn’t your life be spoilt?  Wouldn’t it?  But it isn’t the flat I’ve got, and it isn’t the space I’ve sort of cleared, and it isn’t the ruin and smash for you and me—­it isn’t so much these things that make me feel wicked when I think of the mere possibility of you refusing to come, as the fundamental injustice of the thing to both of us.  My dear girl, no one ever understood you as I do.  I can see it all as well as if I’d been here all the time.  You took fright after—­after his death.  Women are always more frightened after the danger’s over than at the time, especially when they’re brave.  And you thought, “I must do something very good because it was on the cards I might have been very wicked.”  And so it’s Rose and Milly that mustn’t be left ...  I’m not much of an intellect, outside crocks, you know, but there’s one thing I can do, I can see clear?...  Can’t I see clear?’