He took it from her and drank it off in silence. The icy, aromatic liquid seemed an antidote to that other intoxicant she had mocked. Irony flowed through his veins; a bitter-sweet sense of vengeful maturity. When he set down the glass, he looked up at her, and he felt himself measuring his sword against the stiletto of an adversary.
“Well, I’ve had my lesson,” he said. “I’ve been a generous but deluded idealist, it seems, in imagining that men and women are equals in their claims on life. Since I’m an artist, I have a right to my raptures, I take it. And poor Marian must be jealous with reason. Well, well; it’s an odd morality to hear preached.”
Mrs. Dallas still sipped her lemonade and she quietly considered him. She said nothing, and even after she had finished and set down her glass she sat for still a little while in silence.
“I’m sorry I’ve seemed to preach,” she then remarked, “and I certainly think that Marian has every reason to be jealous. What more did I say? That a man isn’t as ridiculous and undignified as a woman when he falls in and out of love-affairs on the condition that he has a big life? That was it, wasn’t it?”
“That was it, and I’m glad to have your assurance that I am in no danger of being ridiculous or undignified.”
“Do you mean,” said Mrs. Dallas, looking at him, “that you think yours such a big life?”
It had been, before, his heart, its tenderness, its devotion and dedication, that she had cut into; it was into something deeper now, something more substantially and vitally at the centre of his life, something of which his heart and all its ardours were but tributaries. He was to learn that self-love could bleed with a fiercer, darker gush. The blood, as if foretelling his ordeal, sprang to his forehead as he looked back at her.
“I have my art,” he said, and he disdained any pretended humility; he spoke with pride and even with solemnity. “I live for my art. I don’t think that I am an insignificant man.”
“Don’t you?” said Mrs. Dallas. It was with an unaffected curiosity that her eyes rested on him, and it sank into him, drop by drop, like poison. “Not insignificant, perhaps,” she took up after a moment. “That’s not quite the word, perhaps. You are very intelligent and appreciative and good-hearted. I don’t suppose one can be quite insignificant if one is that. But—do you call it art, your writing? I wonder. Oh, you are quite right to live for it, of course, just as other men do for stock-broking or fox-hunting or print-collecting, or anything else that employs their energies or satisfies their tastes or brings in money; but, to count as art, a man’s activities must mean more than just his own satisfaction in them, mustn’t they? You write careful, intelligent, sentimental little books; but I can’t feel that the world would be any the poorer if you were to take to stock-broking or fox-hunting instead. No, it doesn’t seem to me, my dear Rupert, that your life is nearly large enough for a succession of love-affairs. It’s all right when one is young and looking for a mate; experiments are in order then; but you’ve found your mate, and you’ll soon be not so very young, and if on the strength of your art you imagine yourself entitled to unseasonable intoxications, you’ll become, in time, an emotional dram-drinker, one of those foolish old inebriates we are all familiar with, and you’ll spoil yourself for what you were meant to be and can be,—a devoted husband and an excellent père de famille.”
Stretched on his rack, broken, bleeding, Rupert stared at her. Who was this woman, this cruel, ambiguous woman who watched his agony with deliberating, drowsy eyes? There came into his mind the memory of a picture seen in childhood, some sentimental print that had strongly impressed his boyish sensibilities. A corner of a Roman amphitheatre, a rising tier of seats; sham architecture, sham Romans, no doubt, and a poor piece of claptrap, looked back on from his maturity; but the face of the Roman woman, leaning so quietly forward under its gold tiara, to watch, unmoved, the tormented combatants below, was it not like this face? Yes, she was of that stony-hearted breed, unaltered by the centuries.