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50 Teresa had befriended, and who looked after the place. Teresa came almost every day to work in the studio. Often she took people there to tea. It was always a place to retreat to when she had quarrelled with Basil. Once or twice she had even stayed over night there with Miss Pease, who cooked her own meals on a chafing- dish; and curled up on a divan Teresa tasted the luxury of freedom, as they chatted about the old days of the studio in Paris, where she had worked hard for two years.

Teresa liked enormously to have this little  apart from Basil. He had his work separately, she had hers, and they met at the flat on equal terms. She clung to outward signs of independence more and more, since of late she had felt sometimes that its spirit was escaping her. She was painfully aware now that she could not do without Basil, and that, if she had not let herself go, it was of no use: she had gone just the same. In her calm moods she looked back on her fits of pointless jealousy, her emotional crises, as simple idiocy. But it seemed to her more and more probable that this idiocy was the woman in her waking up. Basil had chosen to call the creature—blind, primeval, essentially a slave—to life, and he must take the consequences!

As his stormy courtship calmed, what he