Rachel jumped up hastily and rang for her maid, whose ministrations, essential to the dignity of her present position, she certainly did not appreciate.
"I shall not be long dressing," she replied; "and it is early yet."
And then she went into his room to ask him if he had had a pleasant party at dinner, and whether he had enjoyed it, anxious to show him some special tenderness on this special night—anxious to find some shelter in his affection from the reminiscences that beset her.
He was a little irritable, for his gout was troubling him, and he did not respond to her advances. He patted the hand that she laid on his arm in a perfunctory manner, and sent her back to begin her preparations for the ball. He did not wish her to dress herself quickly; he wanted her to make the most of her beauty and her supplementary resources on such a great occasion.
He was very fond of his wife still, and proud of her, and good to her in his own rather tyrannical way; but his marriage with her, after a year and a half of it, had become to himself—as under the circumstances was inevitable—a very unromantic and commonplace affair.
They had lived together in tolerable peace and comfort; they had never quarrelled, simply because it was Rachel's habit to efface herself at the first symptoms of rising temper; but neither had they been companions, in any proper sense of the term.
As yet he had no active sense of injury and injustice, in that the possession of his treasure gave him such meagre compensation for all that he had paid for it, but he did feel, in a general way, that matrimony was—as he confessed he had been well warned that it would be—very tame and dull, and uninteresting, and that it would be too unreasonable altogether to expect a man to devote himself exclusively to its demands. Even little Rachel herself, he was quite sure, would not wish him to be bored to death.
And so he fell back insensibly into many of his old self-indulgent habits, and the pleasures of his bachelor life grew more than ever pleasant. This was particularly the case after his return to Melbourne, where his face became as familiar to club men as in the ante-nuptial days. Some excuse for this independence was supposed to lie in the fact that he and his wife had not yet settled down to housekeeping.
The Toorak mansion was being furnished and decorated with the treasures of art and upholstery that they had brought out with them; and until everything was completed, and the entire establishment was in proper order for their reception, and for the giving of that magnificent house-warming to which the world of Melbourne fashion was looking forward, they were inhabiting a suite of rooms in an hotel, and domestic life, consequently, was to a certain extent disorganised.
On this night of which we are speaking, Rachel thought it was very kind and attentive of him to come home to her a full hour before he needed to have done. It never occurred to her, any more than to him, that he neglected her.