“She is as foolish about little Harry as you are about me.”
“She is quite incapable of feeling as I feel. She is a mere marble woman. I wish she could feel, for then she might understand what I suffer in your desertion. Oh, dear! If in anything she would act like other 201 women! Every one pities you!—you, that have always been the very flower of courtesy and of all that is socially charming!”
“No one need pity me, mother. I consider myself the most fortunate husband in New York. And you ought not to permit people to talk in that way. It is a great wrong to me.”
“I do not, Harry. You may be sure I stand up for you.”
And such conversations, even if Harry did not repeat them, were divined, either from his manner or from some unguarded remark he let fall. It required all the strength of Adriana’s broad character to prevent her divinations from finding a voice—to bear patiently wrongs she could not permit herself to right—and to wait with unabated love for that justification sure to come to those who leave it to the wisdom of their angels behind them.
On this December morning Mrs. Filmer’s visit was unexpectedly early. She met Adriana with a worried face, and barely touching the fingers of her outstretched hand, said, “I have a letter this morning, and I think you ought to know about it, Adriana. It concerns your brother. I am sure it has been the most wretched thing for my poor Rose that she ever met the man.”
“That statement would be hard to prove,” answered Adriana.
“You need not draw yourself up like a tragedy queen because I feel so bitterly the mistake my daughter has made. Rose has been a miserable wife from the first day of her marriage, and there is no use in denying the fact. And if her misery has led her to unwise ways of seeking relief, she is hardly to be 202 blamed. She says, too, that she has never had a day’s health since the birth of her baby. And you know what a stern, unsympathetic man her husband is.”
“I know that Antony has a heart of infinite love and forbearance. Few men would have endured what he has borne without a complaint. Rose is unreasonable, petulant, and, in fact, unmanageable. Several people who saw her last summer have told me about her caprices. They can only be accounted for on the supposition that she had been ‘seeking relief.’”
“I have no doubt Antony is as bad as she is.”