She crept into bed in misery that suggested a defeated thing. The outward eye would never have perceived that the pale woman quivering under the eider-down was inspired with an indomitable purpose, the salvation of a weak man from his weakness. To be sure, she had been worsted in her encounter by something that conveyed the illusion of superior moral force. But that there was any strength in her husband that could be described as moral Anne would not have admitted for a moment. She believed herself to be crushed, grossly, by the superior weight of moral deadness that he carried.
It was, it always had been, his placidity that caused her most despair. But whereas, at the time of their first rupture, it had made him utterly impenetrable, she now took it simply as one more sign of his inability to understand her. She argued that he would never have remained so calm if he had realised the sincerity of her determination to repudiate Mr. Gorst. Of course she didn't expect him to appreciate the force and the fine quality of her feeling. Still, he might at least have known that, if she had found it hard to pardon her own husband his lapses in the past, she would not be likely to accept a recent and notorious evildoer.
She tried to forget that in this she herself had been wounded as a woman and a wife. It was the offence to heaven that she minded, rather than her own mere human hurt. Still, he had asked her to share his house and the sad burden of it (her thought touched gently on the sadness and the burden); and it was the least he could do to keep it undefiled by such presences. He ought to have known what was due to the woman he had married. If he did not, she said to herself sorrowfully, he must learn.
She never doubted that he would learn completely when he was once persuaded that she had meant what she had said; when he saw that he was driving her out of the house by inviting Mr. Gorst into it. To her the question was of supreme importance. Whatever happiness was now left to them must stand or fall by the expulsion of the prodigal.
If she had examined herself, Anne would have found that she hardly knew which she really wished for more: that Majendie would at once surrender to her view and leave off inviting Gorst, or that he would invite him at once, and thus give her an occasion for her protest. That Majendie was peaceable and disinclined to fight she gathered from the fact that he had not invited him at once.
At last, one morning, he looked up quietly from his breakfast, and remarked that he had invited Gorst (he laid a slightly irritating stress upon the name) to dinner on Friday.
The day was Tuesday.
"And is he coming?" said Anne.
"He is," said Majendie.
When Friday came, Anne remarked at breakfast that she was going to dine with Mrs. Eliott.