"I've nothing else to do."
He was filled with a sense of disaster when Mrs. Marwood offered him a job in a political organisation. He knew perfectly well that Stella had consulted Mrs. Marwood, and though his soul protested against it, he accepted. It meant seeing Mrs. Marwood continually, and he began to understand the meaning of her mysterious activities and the atmosphere of importance with which she was surrounded. He also saw that Mrs. Marwood had been trying to get him to do this very thing for a dozen years. The glow of triumph in the woman forced him to see that and he marvelled at the tenacity of purpose in women. . . .
Stella grew every day more beautiful and more lovable, and Digby felt himself growing every day more commonplace and helpless. Sometimes he was terrified. Here was he living, a solitary male, in a house with five females, his wife, Mrs. Marwood, a cook, and two maids. That was an awful thought to him, and it drove him into a mood of violent hostility which lasted for some weeks and at last produced the thing for which he had been hungering—another situation, even though it might be fatal, as, granted his ill-equipment, it probably would be.
It came one night at dinner. Stella had just told him that she thought she was going to have a baby. He should have been happy but was utterly miserable. He wanted a son and was quite certain the baby would be a girl. Mrs. Marwood dropped in at the last moment. She looked tired and really old, a woman who had lost her capacity for physical sympathy. The government was not doing what she thought it ought to do.
"To hell with the government!" said Digby.
"Digby!" cried Stella.
"To hell with politics!" he continued, and he wanted to send a good many things after them, but once again he began to think. His temper vanished. He was filled with a strange clear ecstasy, and he saw the two women sitting there on either side of him as terrible monsters who hated and loathed each other and were bound together in their hatred and in their common concentration upon himself, both demanding of him something that was not there, that could not be there, something that had existed that night under the moon and the pine-trees, something that was not in him or in any man, something perhaps that only women of all things created can
