“Meant? How do you mean? She was joking.”
“If she left him. It was she who left him?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Barney spoke now with definite vexation and Oldmeadow, in his corner of the sofa, his arms folded, his eyes on the cornice, gave him no help. “Except that, yes, certainly; it’s she who left him. She’s not a deserted wife. Anything but.”
“It’s only Mr. Aldesey who is the deserted husband,” Adrienne turned her fan and kept her eyes on it. “It’s only he who can’t be free. Forgive me if she’s a special friend of yours, Mr. Oldmeadow; but it explains. I felt something so brittle, so unreal in her, charming and gracious as she is. It is so very wrong for a woman to do that, I think.”
“Wrong?” Barney echoed, staring at Oldmeadow while this firm hand was laid upon his Egeria. “What the dickens do you mean, darling? She is a special friend of Roger’s. You don’t surely mean to say a woman must, under all circumstances, stick to a man she doesn’t love?”
“Anything but that, Barney. I think that she should leave him and set him free. It’s quite plain to me that if a wife will not live with her husband it is her duty to divorce him. Then, at any rate, he can try for happiness again.”
“Divorce him, my dear child!” Barney was trying to keep up appearances but the note of marital severity came through and as it sounded Adrienne raised her eyes to his: “It’s not so easy as all that! Aldesey, whatever his faults, may have given her no cause to divorce him, and I take it you’ll not suggest that Mrs. Aldesey should give him cause to divorce her.”
On her sofa, more pallid under her powder, more sunken than before, and with the queer squashed-in look emphasized, Adrienne kept steady eyes uplifted to her husband. “Not at all, dear Barney,” she returned and Oldmeadow, though hardened against the pathos of her physical disability, saw that she spoke with difficulty, “but I think that you confuse the real with the conventional wrong. Mrs. Aldesey would not care to face any unconventionality; that is quite apparent. She would draw her skirts aside from any conventional wrong-doing. But the real wrong she would be blind to; the wrong of keeping anyone bound in the emptiness you have made for them. Setting free is not so strange and terrible a matter as you seem to imagine. It’s quite easy for brave, unshackled people.”
“Well, I must really be off,” Oldmeadow now seized the occasion to declare. “I believe, as a matter of fact, that Mr. Aldesey lives very contentedly in New York, collecting French prints and giving excellent dinners. Anything open and scandalous would be as distasteful to him as to his wife. They are, both of them, happier apart; that’s all it comes to. So you must read your lessons, even by proxy, to more authentic misdemeanants, Mrs. Barney. All right, Barney. Don’t come down. I’ll hope to see you both again quite soon.”
So he got away, concealing as best he might, his sense of tingling anger. But it died away to a sense of chill as he walked down Park Lane. Was not Barney unhappy, already? What did she say to him when she got him to herself? He felt sure that she had never bargained for a husband who could look at her with ill-temper.