Hilda now, after hesitation, put the packet of letters in her handbag, to take with her. It was a precaution of secrecy which she admitted to be unnecessary, for she was quite certain that Edwin never looked into her drawers; much less would he try to open a locked drawer; his incurious confidence in her was in some respects almost touching. Certainly nobody else would invade the drawer. Still, she hid the letters in her handbag. Then, in her fashion, she scribbled a bold-charactered note to Mrs. Cannon, giving a temporary address, and this also she put in the handbag.
Her attitude to Mrs. Cannon, like her attitude to the bigamist, had slowly changed, and she thought of the old woman now with respect and sympathetic sorrow. Mrs. Cannon, before she knew that Hilda was married to Edwin, had addressed her first letter to Hilda, "Mrs. Cannon," when she would have been justified in addressing it, "Miss Lessways." In the days of her boarding-house it had been impossible, owing to business reasons, for Hilda to drop the name to which she was not entitled and to revert to her own. The authentic Mrs. Cannon, despite the violence of her grievances, had respected Hilda’s difficulty; the act showed kindly forbearance and it had aroused Hilda’s imaginative gratitude. Further, Mrs. Cannon’s pertinacity in the liberation proceedings, and her calm, logical acceptance of all the frightful consequences of being the legal wife of a convict, had little by little impressed Hilda, who had said to herself: "There is something in this old woman." And Hilda nowadays never thought of her as an old woman who had been perverse and shameless in desire, but as a victim of passion like George Cannon. She said to herself: "This old woman still loves George Cannon; her love was the secret of her rancour against him, and it is also the secret of her compassion." These constant reflections, by their magnanimity, and their insistence upon the tremendous reality of love, did something to ennoble the clandestine and demoralising life of the soul which for a year Hilda had hidden from her husband and from everybody.
It still wanted twenty minutes to nine o’clock. She was too soon. The night before, Edwin had abraded her sore nerves by warning her not to be late--in a tone that implied habitual lateness on her part. Hilda was convinced that she was an exact woman. She might be late--a little late--six times together, but as there was a sound explanation of and excuse for each shortcoming, her essential exactitude remained always unimpaired in her own mind. But Edwin would not see this. He told her now and then that she belonged to that large class of people who have the illusion that a clock stands still at the last moment while last things are being done. She resented the observation, as she resented many of Edwin’s assumptions concerning her. Edwin seemed to forget that she had been one of the first women-stenographers in England, that she had been a journalist-secretary and accustomed to correct the negligences of men of business, and finally that she had been in business by herself for a number of years. Edwin would sweep all that away, and treat her like one of your mere brainless butterflies. At any rate, on the present occasion she was not late. And she took pride, instead of shame, in her exaggerated earliness. She had the air of having performed a remarkable feat.