§ ii
Claudine had watched them go from her window, with some uneasiness. People of his sort were so hard to handle! Why hadn’t he the tact to go away? It was so difficult to keep a middle course between offending him and offending Gilbert; she dwelt with dismay, not for the first time, on the uncompromising nature of men, how rudely they upset all feminine niceties. Nothing might be implicit or vague with them. Even Bertie, her marvelous boy, had to tell her things, and be frank about his feelings, in a way Andrée and Edna never were.
She spent a peaceful day, reading and writing letters. The letters did her good, put her in touch with her own little world again, restored to her some measure of complacency. She was unhappy and her life very futile and insignificant, but it might have been so much worse; it might have been harmful. She re-read Lizzie Wiley’s letter, full of the atrocious Bernardine Perceval, who had left her husband.
“I saw Bernardine,” she wrote, “on the street car with the little girl. What she will drag the child into I don’t know. I thank God there are still a few like yourself left.” And so on. Lizzie Wiley was a wealthy spinster of passionate moral views and her approval was not without weight. Claudine thought with a faint smile of her own bad moment, twenty years before, when she had wanted to leave Gilbert; she had a fairly definite idea that those moments occurred in most marriages; for an instant she wondered what had made her resist it. Duty? Fear? Lance? She didn’t much want to know, and put the thought aside. The fact remained that she had stayed and done well, for Gilbert, for herself, for her children.
She wrote a plaintively humorous letter to Nina Sidell, whose Violet was just Andrée’s age. Violet was a frightful worry, in a way her daughters would never be. Wasn’t that something else to her credit? Then there was Connie Martinsburgh, whose four exuberant and handsome children were all troublesome. Perhaps, although she seemed to herself so entirely negative, she did after all exert a good influence over her family.... That absurd young Stephens had upset her, with his terrific vitality; he had made her feel so pallid, so helpless, so useless. Poor Breath of Life, with his gold cigarette case!