She glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door.
“I will send a telegram,” she said, and left him still malignant.
She closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards her own room....
§10
She had to be patient. She had to be patient. This sort of thing had to go on from crisis to crisis. It might go on for years. She could see no remedy and no escape.
What else was there to do but be patient? It was all amazing unjust, but to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside justice. It is autocracy. She had once imagined otherwise, and most of her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. She had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation.
She sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised for her.
She rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. But what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous and acquisitive men?
She drew the telegram form towards her.
She was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring Crappen headlong—to disinherit her absolutely. And—it suddenly struck her—her husband had trusted her to write it. She was going to do what he had trusted her to do.... But it was absurd.