itself in cruelty to his wife. It might very well have done so,
would all but certainly, had not Alice appealed to his sense of humour by her
zeal in espousing his cause against her brother. That he could turn her round
his finger was an old experience, but to see her spring so actively to arms on
his behalf, when he was conscious that she had every excuse for detesting him,
and even abandoning him, struck him as a highly comical instance of his power
over women, a power on which he had always prided himself. He could not even
explain it as self-interest in her; numberless things proved the contrary. Alice
was still his slave, though he had not given himself the slightest trouble to
preserve even her respect. He had shown himself to her freely as he was,
jocosely cynical on everything that women prize, brutal when he chose to give
way to his temper, faithless on principle, selfish to the core; perhaps the
secret of the fascination he exercised over her was his very ingenuousness, his
boldness in defying fortune, his clever grasp of circumstances. She said to him
one day, when he had been telling her that as likely as not she might have to
take in washing or get up a sewing-machine:
    »I am not afraid. You can always get money. There's nothing you can't do.«
    He laughed.
    »That may be true. But how if I disappear some day and leave you to take
care of yourself?«
    He had often threatened this in his genial way, and it never failed to
blanch her cheeks.
    »If you do that,« she said, »I shall kill myself.«
    At which he laughed yet more loudly.
    In her house at Wimbledon she perished of ennui, for she was as lonely as
Adela in Holloway. Much lonelier; she had no resources in herself. Rodman was
away all day in London, and very often he did not return at night; when the
latter was the case, Alice cried miserably in her bed for hours, so that the
next morning her face was like that of a wax doll that has suffered ill-usage.
She had an endless supply of novels, and day after day bent over them till her
head ached. Poor Princess! She had had her own romance, in its way brilliant and
strange enough, but only the rags of it were left. She clung to them, she hoped
against hope that they would yet recover their gloss and shimmer. If only he
would not so neglect her! All