"'It's what you and I stood up and promised before a lot of people.'"
Finally she does, just to please him, in the sad knowledge that no good will come of it.
"You'd forgotten, hadn't you? But just see what you promised. Didn't you mean to keep these promises when you made them?"
"Oh, of course I did. Why ask that?"
"But now you want to back out."
Then the old argument that a promise which one is powerless to keep isn't a bona fide promise and cannot be so regarded. Fulton sees that for himself presently.
"No, of course," he says. "If you don't love me, you can't make yourself by an effort of will. And if you don't honor me …"
"You know I do."
"How about the other thing, the promise to obey? That is surely in your power to keep."
She admits that she can keep that promise; but she leaves herself a loophole. She does not say that she will keep it.
And so the words of the prayer book shed no light on the situation, and I shouldn't wonder if Fulton raged against the book, and flung it into a far corner, and was immediately sorry.
For a man situated as Fulton was, some definite plan of action is necessary; and to my mind the one that would be best would be one in which the least possible consideration for the woman should be shown. When Lucy began to play clench-dummy with her own life, with her husband's love, and with the institution of marriage, Fulton, I think, would have made no mistake if he had stripped her to the skin and taken a great whip to her.
Her whole life had been one of self-indulgence. She had indulged herself with Fulton's love till she was glutted with it; that she was the mother of two children may, perhaps, be traced to self-indulgence, and surely it must be laid down to self-indulgence that she was not the mother of more than two. Her self-indulgence kept Fulton poor and in debt, and it had come to this: that her impulse to self-indulgence would now stop at nothing unless circumstances should prove too strong for it.
It is not the gentle, faithful, self-sacrificing man who keeps his wife's love; it never was. It was always the man who had in him a good deal of the brute.
But, except in a moment of insanity, a man does not go against his nature. Fulton has too good a brain not to think that if Lucy were locked up for a week or so, and fed on bread and water, good might come of it. But his was not the hand to turn the key in the lock. He could no more have done it than he could have struck her. This sudden failure of her love for him was only another evidence of that wastefulness and extravagance which had so often hurt him financially. Surely it must have occurred to him more than once to publish notices in the newspapers to the effect that he would only be responsible for his own debts. He must, I think, have threatened the thing from time to time, knowing in his heart that he could never bring himself to put it into execution.
I wonder how Fulton felt when hard upon the knowledge that she no longer loved him, he received the bill for the dance which she had given against his wishes, and in full knowledge of his present financial predicament?
She had treated him so badly that it is a wonder of wonders that he kept on loving her.
For one thing they deserve great credit. Even Evelyn Gray, a guest in the house, did not know that there was any trouble between them. All she thought was that owing to financial and other worries, which time would right, Fulton seemed a little graver and less enthusiastic than usual.
Nor was I any wiser. I had not, of course, so many chances of seeing the two together, but I saw as much of Lucy as ever, for we rode together nearly every day.