ONE:It was that which his wife had expressed in her manner and her words: it was that for which he had chosen to swear at her. He had given her a good knock for hinting at it, and had followed up that knock by the stupid sort of joke about the superiority of her charms to those of Alice, which she was sure to appreciate. She had done so; she had said, For shame! and gone simpering to bed. Perhaps that would take her mind off the other affair. He sincerely hoped it would, but he distrusted her stupidity. A cleverer woman would have probably accepted the more superficial truth that there had never passed between him and Norah a single intimate word, but a stupid one might easily let a dull unfounded suspicion take root in her mind. It was difficult to deal with stupid people: you never knew where their stupidity might break out next. Emmeline had a certain power of sticking, and Mrs Fyson had a brilliant imagination. Together they might evolve some odious by-product, one that would fumble and shove its way into the underlying truth.{152}She had come back in the afternoon without her parcel, and his imagination pictured her{126} telling her brother all that had happened. He felt he must have cut a sorry figure. Thats the end of his books and his book-plates for me, would be the sort of way Norah would sum it all up. Probably they did not discuss it much: there really was very little need for comment on what he had done. The simple facts were sufficient: perhaps she had smiled again as she smiled when she rejected his first overtures.
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