Ten days went by.

For Aliette, the trivial round of London continued.

She attended a terrific tamasha of a wedding--all frocks and roses--at St. George's, Hanover Square; she dined at the Carlton with Hector and a sumptuous client from the money-making North; she walked the park with Ponto, her harlequin Dane, who, as though he understood his mistress was troubled, kept close at heel while she footed it, and thrust a consolatory nose into her lap whenever she sat down; she played lawn-tennis at Queen's; she did her household duties at Lancaster Gate, fighting and defeating a miniature revolution among the female staff. But her emotions she could neither fight nor defeat.

These emotions were all strange, sweet, disturbing. For the first time in her life a man obscured the entire mental horizon. Constantly she thought of Ronnie--imagining him her confidant, her friend, her lover.

Her mind took a whole week to formulate that last definite word; and even then the word seemed inadequate.

Except for Mary O'Riordan and Mollie, Aliette possessed no intimates of her own sex. Common gossip, however, credited various women of her acquaintance with "lovers": some permanent, accepted as institutions by every one except the husband; some transitory of the season; most merest "tame-cats," fetch-and-carry men. Hector's wife wanted none of these. She wanted Ronnie--not an occasional Ronnie, not a clandestine Ronnie, neither a merely physical nor a merely platonic Ronnie: but Ronnie himself--all of Ronnie--Ronnie for her very own.

Comprehension of this fact--it came to her with peculiar clarity one late afternoon at a crowded tea-fight in Mary O'Riordan's house off Park Lane--brought the woman up short by the head.

She realized herself wholly in love--dangerously, perilously, passionately in love. And the realization frightened her. It meant the abandoning of her own fixed point of view. It meant, actually, if not by intention, sin. At least it ought to mean "sin"--only somehow she could no longer regard it in that light. If she had not thought of Mary as sinful, why should she apply a different standard to her own case?

If this immense new tenderness in her, this accentuation of all her femininity, was "sin"--then nature's self must be sinful. If, by religion, she belonged body and soul to Hector, forever and ever amen; if, in the sight of God, his infidelities counted for nothing; if his occasional desire to possess her (only the night before she had been subtly aware of that desire's recrudescence) constituted a lifelong claim--then religion, as she had so far understood religion, must be a mere code designed in the interest of husbands, and God Himself a mere male.