She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood Mrs. Duchemin's:
"You couldn't expect us, with our official position . . . to connive . . ." Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She couldn't be expected. . . . She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! You can't ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! . . . It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said—to Mark:
"It's as if the whole world had conspired . . . like a carpenter's vice—to force us . . ." she was going to say "together. . . ." But he burst in, astonishingly:
"He must have his buttered toast . . . and his mutton chop . . . and Rhum St. James!" He said: "Damn it all. . . . You were made for him. . . . You can't blame people for coupling you. . . . They're forced to it. . . . If you hadn't existed they'd have had to invent you . . . Like Dante for . . . who was it? . . . Beatrice? There are couples like that."
She said:
"Like a carpenter's vice. . . . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven't we resisted?"
His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:
"You won't . . . because of my ox's hoof . . . desert . . ."
She said:—she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.
"I ask you to believe that I will never . . . abandon . . ."