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any more obvious way. Rex’s words – automatic as they were, almost meaningless as they must be from him – proved that the girl might also be desirable in the most obvious way of all. Muriel’s distaste and hostility were strengthened by what she had overheard. Still more, a confusion in herself, which she was honest enough to ponder, disquieted her. To be jealous of Hester where Robert was concerned was legitimate and fitting, she thought; but to be jealous of the girl’s least success with other men revealed a harshness from which she turned sickly away. There was nothing now which she could allow Hester, no generosity or praise: grudged words of courtesy which convention forced her to speak seemed to wither on her lips with the enormity of their untruthfulness.
    Her jealousy had grown from a fitful nagging to a chronic indisposition, an unreasonableness beyond her control.
    She went, after breakfast, to her bedroom without waiting to see Hester follow Robert to his study. The days had often seemed too long for her and now pain had its own way of spinning them out. To go to her kitchen and begin some healing job like baking bread would have appeared to her cook as a derangement and a nuisance. She was childless, kitchenless; without remedy or relief.
    Robert, she thought, had not so much become a stranger as revealed himself as the stranger he had for a long time been. The manifestation of this both alarmed her and stirred her conscience. Impossible longings, which had sometimes unsettled her – especially in the half-seasons and at that hour when the light beginning to fade invests garden or darkening room with a romantic languor – had seemed a part of her femininity. The idea that men – or men like Robert – should be beset by the same dangerous sensations would have astonished her by its vulgarity. Their marriage had continued its discreet way. Now, she could see how it had changed its course from those first years, with their anniversaries, secrets, discussions; his hidden disappointment over her abortive pregnancies; the consolation and the bitter tears – all embarrassing now in her memory, but shouldering their way up through layers of discretion to wound and worry her. She had allowed herself to change; but she could tolerate no change in Robert, except for the decline in his ardour, which she had felt herself reasonable in expecting.
    In rather the same spirit as Hester’s when she had faced the terrors of the churchyard the night before, Muriel now went into Robert’s dressing-room and shut the door. She knelt down before a chest, and, pulling out the bottom drawer, found, where she knew she would find them, among his old school photographs, the bundle of letters she had written to him when they were betrothed.
    She felt nausea, but a morbid impatience, as if she were about to read letters from his mistress. The first of the pile began: ‘Dear Mr Evans …’ It was a cool, but artful, invitation. She remembered writing it after their first meeting, thinking he had gone for ever and wanting to draw him back to her. ‘I am writing for my mother, as she is busy.’ Not only had he been drawn back, but he had kept the letter. Perhaps he had had his own plans for their meeting again. She might well have let things be and sat at home and waited – so difficult a thing for a young girl to do.
    That first letter was the only time he was ‘Mr Evans’. After that, he progressed from ‘Dear Robert’, through ‘My Dear Robert’, ‘Dearest Robert’, ‘Robert Dearest’, to ‘Darling’. In the middle period of the letters – for he had preserved them chronologically – the style was comradely, witty, undemanding. (‘Intolerably affected,’ Muriel now thought, her neck reddening with indignation. ‘Arch! Oh, yes!’ Did Hester write so to him and could he, at his age, feel no distaste?) The letters, patently snobbish, shallow, worked up, had taken hours to write, she remembered. Everything that