During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband's study and waited.

She looked back upon that other period of suspense--the hour when she had waited at the hospital during his operation--as a time of comparative peace.

She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue, if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint.

Then she had foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that seemed to her weak.
She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent.

She had even loved it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being; coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of nerves and nurses was intolerable to her.