Still laughing he pulled me still closer to him, and putting one of his hands under my chin he kissed me on the mouth.

It will be difficult and perhaps it will be ridiculous to say how my husband's first kiss shocked me. My mouth felt parched, I had a sense of intense disgust, and before I was quite aware of what I was doing I had put up both hands to push him off.

"Come, come, this is going too far," he said, in a tone that was half playful, half serious. "It was all very well in the automobile; but here, in your own rooms, you know... ."

He broke off and laughed again, saying that if my modesty only meant that nobody had ever kissed me before it made me all the more charming for him.

I could not help feeling a little ashamed of my embarrassment, and crossing in front of my husband I seated myself in a chair before the fire. He looked after me with a smile that made my heart tremble, and then, coming behind my chair, he put his arms about my shoulders and kissed my neck.

A shiver ran through me. I felt as if I had suffered a kind of indecency. I got up and changed my place. My husband watched me with the look of a man who wanted to roar with laughter. It was the proud and insolent as well as passionate look of one who had never so much as contemplated resistance.

"Well, this is funny," he said. "But we'll see presently! We'll see!"

A waiter came in for orders, and early as it was my husband asked for dinner to be served immediately. My heart was fluttering excitedly by this time and I was glad of the relief which the presence of other people gave me.

While the table was being laid my husband talked of the doings of the day. He asked who was "the seedy old priest" who had given us "the sermon" at the wedding breakfast--he had evidently forgotten that he had seen the Father before.

I told him the "seedy old priest" was Father Dan, and he was a saint if ever there was one.

"A saint, is he?" said my husband. "Wish saint were not synonymous with simpleton, though."

Then he gave me his own views of "the holy state of matrimony." By holding people together who ought to be apart it often caused more misery and degradation of character than a dozen entirely natural adulteries and desertions, which a man had sometimes to repair by marriage or else allow himself to be regarded as a seducer and a scoundrel.

I do not think my husband was conscious of the naive coarseness of all this, as spoken to a young girl who had only just become his wife. I am sure he was not aware that he was betraying himself to me in every word he uttered and making the repugnance I had begun to feel for him deepen into horror.

My palms became moist, and again and again I had to dry them with my handkerchief. I was feeling more frightened and more ashamed than I had ever felt before, but nevertheless when we sat down to dinner I tried to compose myself. Partly for the sake of appearance before the servants, and partly because I was taking myself to task for the repugnance I felt towards my husband, I found something to say, though my voice shook.

My husband ate ravenously and drank a good deal. Once or twice, when he insisted on pouring out champagne for me, I clinked glasses with him.

Although every moment at table was increasing my fear and disgust, I sometimes allowed myself to laugh.

Encouraged by this he renewed his endearments even before the waiters had left the room, and when they had gone, with orders not to return until he rang, and the door was closed behind them, he switched off the lights, pushed a sofa in front of the fire, put me to sit on it, sat down beside me and redoubled his tenderness.

"How's my demure little nun now?" he said. "Frightened, wasn't she?

They're all frightened at first, bless them!"

I could smell the liquor he had been drinking. I could see by the firelight the prominent front tooth (partly hidden by his moustache) which I had noticed when I saw him first, and the down of soft hair which grew as low on his hands as his knuckles. Above all I thought I could feel the atmosphere of other women about him--loose women, bad women as it seemed to me--and my fear and disgust began to be mixed with a kind of physical horror.

For a little while I tried to fight against this feeling, but when he began to put his arms about me, calling me by endearing names, complaining of my coldness, telling me not to be afraid of him, reminding me that I belonged to him now, and must do as he wished, a faintness came over me, I trembled from head to foot and made some effort to rise.

"Let me go," I said.

"Nonsense," he said, laughing and holding me to my seat. "You bewitching little woman! You're only teasing me. How they love to tease, these charming little women!"

The pupils of his eyes were glistening. I closed my own eyes in order to avoid his look. At the next moment I felt his hand stray down my body and in a fury of indignation I broke out of his arms and leapt to my feet.

When I recovered my self-possession I was again looking out of the window, and my husband, who was behind me, was saying in a tone of anger and annoyance:

"What's the matter with you? I can't understand. What have I done? Good heavens, we are man and wife, aren't we?"

I made no answer. My heart which had been hot with rage was becoming cold with dread. It seemed to me that I had suffered an outrage on my natural modesty as a human being, a sort of offence against my dignity as a woman.

It was now dark. With my face to the window I could see nothing. The rain was beating against the glass. The sea was booming on the rocks. I wanted to fly, but I felt caged--morally and physically caged.

My husband had lit a cigarette and was walking up and down the sitting-room, apparently trying to think things out. After awhile he approached me, out his hand on my shoulder and said:

"I see how it is. You're tired, and no wonder. You've had a long and exhausting day. Better go to bed. We'll have to be up early."

Glad to escape from his presence I allowed him to lead me to the large bedroom. As I was crossing the threshold he told me to undress and get into bed, and after that he said something about waiting. Then he closed the door softly and I was alone.

THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

There was a fire in the bedroom and I sat down in front of it. Many forces were warring within me. I was trying to fix my thoughts and found it difficult to do so.

Some time passed. My husband's man came in with the noiseless step of all such persons, opened one of the portmanteaux and laid out his master's combs and brushes on the dressing table and his sleeping suit on the bed. A maid of the hotel followed him, and taking my own sleeping things out of the top tray of my trunk she laid them out beside my husband's.

"Good-night, my lady," they said in their low voices as they went out on tiptoe.

I hardly heard them. My mind, at first numb, was now going at lightning speed. Brought face to face for the first time with one of the greatest facts of a woman's life I was asking myself why I had not reckoned with it before.

I had not even thought of it. My whole soul had been so much occupied with one great spiritual issue--that I did not love my husband (as I understood love), that my husband did not love me--that I had never once plainly confronted, even in my own mind, the physical fact that is the first condition of matrimony, and nobody had mentioned it to me or even hinted at it.

I could not plead that I did not know of this condition. I was young but I was not a child. I had been brought up in a convent, but a convent is not a nursery. Then why had I not thought of it?

While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband's movements in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed.

"Don't keep me long, little girl."

I shuddered but made no reply.

At last he knocked softly and said he was coming in. I was still crouching over the fire as he came up behind me.

"Not in bed yet?" he said. "Then I must put you to bed."

Before I could prevent him he had lifted me in his arms, dragged me on to his knee and was pulling down my hair, laughing as he did so, calling me by coarse endearing names and telling me not to fight and struggle.

But the next thing I knew I was back in the sitting-room, where I had switched up the lights, and my husband, whose face was distorted by passion, was blazing out at me.

"What do you mean?" he said. "I'm your husband, am I not? You are my wife, aren't you? What did you marry for? Good heavens, can it be possible that you don't know what the conditions of matrimony are? Is that what comes of being brought up in a convent? But has your father allowed you to marry without... . And your Aunt--what in God's name has the woman been doing?"

I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my husband intercepted me.

"Don't be a fool," he said, catching at my wrist. "Think of the servants. Think what they'd say. Think what the whole island would say.

Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?"

I returned and sat by the table. My husband lit another cigarette.