Again he had that disaffected look from her; she seemed to analyse him coldly.
"It isn't a sermon. Go on grumbling and nagging and grudging every day, if you want to. I haven't asked you to refrain. I've merely explained that, as a result of your husbandly behaviour, you've ceased to attract me, and I don't want to live with you—intimately—again."
He caught her arm. "Look here! I know. You've been to some of these beastly Suffragette meetings."
She laughed scornfully.
"Suffragette! Don't be an ass, dear!"
"No," he said under his breath, regarding her, "you haven't. Hanged if I know what you have been doing."
"I told you. Getting my youth back. Do you know what a very pretty young girl feels like? Did you know what I used to feel like when you were engaged to me? Like a queen with a crowd of courtiers at her orders and you the most courtier-like of them all! You used to hang on every word I said and promise me heaven and earth, and my every look was law. Oh! the power a pretty young girl feels in herself!"
Standing on tiptoe she looked into the glass, touched her fluffs of hair and the purple earrings with tender finger-tips.
"I've got it back," she said with a thrill. "I feel it flowing back; the power one has through being pretty and magnetic. If a woman's tired out she can't be magnetic. But I've got it all again—and more. I wonder if a man can ever understand the pleasure of having it? It's coming to me again just as I had it fresh and unconquered in those dear old days when you were at my feet."
He spoke in a sort of beaten amazement. "If you want me again at your feet—"