A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping

Catherine's lips were tightly set as she turned from the shadows of St. Antonia's elms, where the sunlight made a moving fret of gold upon the grass. The sky was a broad canopy of blue above the town, the wooded hills about it far and faint with haze. To Catherine the summer stillness of the place, the dim blazoned windows of the church, the wreathing smoke, the circling pigeons, were parts of a quaint and homely tenderness that made her realize the more the repellent coldness of the house she had just left.

She had come by one conviction through her visit, the conviction that those two intellectualists hungered to humiliate her and her husband. Mrs. Betty's eyes had betrayed too much. She would be content with nothing but sensational head-lines, and the discussion of "the scandal" in every Roxton home. The brain behind that ethereal yet supercilious face knew no flush of feeling for a rival in distress. The pair were exulting over the chance James Murchison had given them, and the wife had realized it with a bitter flooding up of loyalty and love.