Chapter III


A telegram had told me to come to a town ten miles from the house, so I
was saved the crawling train to the local station, and traveled down by
an express. As soon as we left London the fog cleared off, and an autumn
sun, though without heat in it, painted the landscape with golden browns
and yellows. My spirits rose as I lay back in the luxurious motor and
sped between the woods and hedges. Oddly enough, my anxiety of overnight
had disappeared. It was due, no doubt, to that exaggeration of detail
which reflection in loneliness brings. Frances and I had not been
separated for over a year, and her letters from The Towers told so
little. It had seemed unnatural to be deprived of those intimate
particulars of mood and feeling I was accustomed to. We had such
confidence in one another, and our affection was so deep. Though she was
but five years younger than myself, I regarded her as a child. My
attitude was fatherly.

In return, she certainly mothered me with a solicitude that never
cloyed. I felt no desire to marry while she was still alive. She painted
in watercolors with a reasonable success, and kept house for me; I
wrote, reviewed books and lectured on aesthetics; we were a humdrum
couple of quasi-artists, well satisfied with life, and all I feared for
her was that she might become a suffragette or be taken captive by one
of these wild theories that caught her imagination sometimes, and that
Mabel, for one, had fostered. As for myself, no doubt she deemed me a
trifle solid or stolid--I forget which word she preferred--but on the
whole there was just sufficient difference of opinion to make
intercourse suggestive without monotony, and certainly without