"Oh, that's a part of it. She likes the newness of the house and the air of costliness about it, but most of all, she feels that she could never settle down to our monotonous way of living. Geoffrey promised her to take her to Europe again in the summer and I think she began to grow restless when it appeared that she might have to give it up."
"But one of us could have taken her to Europe, if that's all she wanted. You could have gone with her."
"Not in Alice's way, we could never have afforded it. She told me this when I offered to go with her if she would definitely separate from Geoffrey."
"Then you didn't want her to go back? You didn't encourage it?"
"I encouraged her to behave with decency—and this isn't decent."
"No, I admit that. It decidedly is not."
"Yet we have no assurance that she won't fly in upon us at dinner to-night, with all the servants about," she reflected mournfully.
His awful levity broke out as it always did whenever she invoked the sanctity of convention.
"In that case hadn't we better serve ourselves until she has made up her mind?" he inquired.
But the submission of the martyr is proof even against caustic wit, and she looked at him, after a minute, with a smile of infinite patience.