§ iii
And the next morning he regarded it all as a great joke. He complained ruefully of a headache, but he was proud of it. He burst out laughing when his mother mentioned her damaged carpet, and to Claudine’s surprise, the old lady was wonderfully indulgent. He told Claudine not to mind, it wouldn’t happen again; but it did, more than once. Only on special occasions, though, as he pointed out to her; he was no drunkard. He was simply a good fellow; and he felt that she ought to appreciate his social qualities. He was sincerely aggrieved at her attitude, her scorn, her cold aversion. He told her she was straitlaced and puritanical; he thought she was shocked because he could not imagine that she was disgusted. She didn’t find him devilish; she found him repulsive. It was not a question of forgiveness; she felt for him a profound distaste and aversion which she never again overcame. It was not even that she had ceased to love him; she had simply discovered that she never had loved him. She was not by nature affectionate or indulgent; she was fastidious, always a little apart from life, never quite human. She was a dutiful egoist.
She looked back over these three months of married life with a sort of cold wonder. The long, long days, the tedious drives, the dull calls on dull people, the unpleasant meals, the stuffy dismalness of the house! She thought that the Vincelle friends were the most unspeakably tiresome people in the world. To go with her mother-in-law and sit in their augustly gloomy parlours for the required fifteen minutes, or to receive them in like fashion at home, to sit at their dinner tables, or to see them sitting at hers, was an infliction almost beyond her endurance. Except at dinners, she saw nothing but women; they had euchre-parties, receptions, luncheons, once in a while a matinée party. A harem world of pampered women, interested in nothing, women whose husbands were pleased to see them expensively dressed, wearing jewels, who required them to be ladylike; but didn’t expect them to be seductive. They were all good, all complacent, and they seemed to Claudine years and years older and more mature than herself. She made no friends. Vincelle heard that one of the young married women did china painting, and that aroused a spark of interest in her. She approached the alleged artist, young Mrs. Ryder.
“Oh, yes! I love it!” the artist told her. “Of course I don’t have much time; but I positively made up my mind not to drop it after I married. It’s such a mistake, don’t you think, to get into a rut? I believe a man thinks ever so much more of his wife if she has some interests of her own.”
Claudine’s heart sank; then it was, after all, nothing but another harem accomplishment, a trick to secure attention.
“Of course I don’t have much time,” the other went on. “There’s so much to do, isn’t there?”
“What do you do?” Claudine asked, with earnestness. “I wish you’d tell me what you do all day?”
“Oh ... so many things!” murmured the other, taken aback. “There’s the house-keeping, of course—and social duties ... and with a man in the house there are such a lot of little things....”
Now it must be admitted that Claudine was not a lover of her kind. She had no special interest in humanity; she was not ready to see the simple human qualities in those about her. She was an aloof, eager soul, greedy for activity, for gaiety, and for something more than that. She wanted food for thought; she was not very original, she needed perpetual stimulation, a constant flow of external impressions. She did not wish to meditate, she wished to observe.
She was baffled at every turn. She tried to discover what it was that enabled the old lady to pass the time so tranquilly without impatience or weariness. After a few orders to the servants and her marketing, she had nothing to do. Other old ladies came in during the afternoons to talk with her; often there were old ladies from the country spending a few days with her, they talked of other old ladies known to them with a sort of good-humoured indifference.... Perhaps that was the key to it—a profound and cynical indifference, nothing mattered; one endured and existed, and life consisted not in accomplishment, but in a perfectly passive Duty.
The old lady said Claudine was excitable, and even went so far as to call her frivolous. And yet the only part of Claudine’s life which either she or her son took with any seriousness were these horrible little frivolities, the euchre club, the dinner parties, the calls. Her social duties....
“What in the world makes you so restless, child?” the old lady asked her one afternoon. Claudine had come into her room and was wandering about looking at the photographs, asking idle questions.
“I don’t know what to do with myself!” she answered suddenly.
“Do? Why, what under the sun do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.... But it seems.... Oh, it seems such a waste of time!”
“I must say you have very queer notions for a young married woman, Claudine. I’ve never heard of anyone else with such notions. You have your home, and your friends. And there’s the euchre club, and Gilbert takes you to the theatre every mortal week. What more do you want?”
This Claudine was unable to answer. The old lady regarded her severely.
“I only hope,” she went on, “that the time will never come when you’ll look back on these days as the happiest time of your life.... I remember when I was a young married woman—” she sighed. “I can tell you, I hadn’t much time to worry about what to do, with my five children.”
“I wish I had five children,” said Claudine.
The old lady looked at her again.
“Humph!” she said.