"Pretty, is she? I hadn't noticed it." Again he seemed puzzled, as if it
were really too difficult to connect up these absurd adjectives with
Vivian. Then an idea occurred to him.

"You're not _jealous_, sweetheart, are you?"

"No," she lied.

"Vivian is--well, Vivian," he explained, making matters worse. And Lucy
knew that if she had said "beautiful, fascinating, majestic," if she had
used all the superlatives in the world, they would have seemed to him
equally irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much in love with
his wife and she knew it and soon, in his tender, whimsical, loving,
teasing way, he had made her perfectly happy again.

She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her cendre
hair--shadows shot with sunlight--falling like a waterfall over her
shoulders. With one hand she was combing it, with the other she fingered
a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon--lovely snapshots, full
of sunshine and queer, characteristic positions and expressions. They
might, she thought, have been taken by a loving detective.

Tony came in.

"Do you remember," she said--and then, suddenly, with a wave of misery,
she realised it. The phrase did not belong to her.