She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.

"Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I've married,"

she said. "I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him here."

"You didn't. You thought I wasn't comin' home."

"Why should I have thought such a thing?" she said, swiftly, sharply.

Her voice had an edge to it.

"You meant not to come home, then?"

She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered, thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it, but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely to have been crushed by the weight of Fritz's fury, she dominated him.

Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.

"You meant not to come home?"

For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to his wife he retorted:

"You meant me to find Ulford here! That's a good 'un! Why, you tried all you knew to keep him out."

"Yes."

"Well, then?"

"I wanted--but you'd never understand."

"He does," said Lord Holme.

He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:

"And you do."

"I?"

"Yes, you. There's lots of fellers that would--"

"Stop!" said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.

She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say sitting down.

"Fritz," she added, "you're a fool. You may be worse. I believe you are. But one thing's certain--you're a fool. Even in wickedness you're a blunderer."

"And what are you?" he said.

"I!" she answered, coming a step nearer. "I'm not wicked."

A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire--as she had slangily expressed it to Robin Pierce--to "trot out" the white angel whom she had for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there? Some there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others.

And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them, she relied on them at this moment.

"I'm not wicked," she repeated.

She looked into her husband's face.

"Don't you know that?"

He was silent.

"Perhaps you'd rather I was," she continued. "Don't men prefer it?"

He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his face.

"But I don't care," she said, gathering resolution, and secretly calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to whether she was there in her place of concealment. "I don't care. I can't change my nature because of that. And surely--surely there must be some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--"

"Ulford, eh?" he interrupted.

The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme's temper. She forgot the believers in the angel and the angel too.

"How dare you?" she exclaimed. "As if I--"

He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage returning.

"Good women don't do things like that," he said. "If it was known in London you'd be done for."

"And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?"

"Men's different," he said.

The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch, and her sense of impotent fury was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that men should be "different," or at least--if not that--had smilingly given them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever, almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him.

An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.

"Men's made different and treated differently," he said. "And they'd never stand anything else."

Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her left hand and held it tightly in her lap.

"You mean," she said, in a hard, quiet voice, "that you may humiliate your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn't take much to kill it. Perhaps it's dead already."

No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment she thought that probably it was truth.

"Eh?" said Lord Holme.

He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered in shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement, that overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo Ulford's midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the uttermost faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps her love for him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man.

Had his conceit then no limits?

And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too, a firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now--? Can there be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit.

She called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in her heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over his forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she thought that the colour of the red deepened.

"Come here, Fritz," she said softly.