Mollie Thornton now blushed deeply.
“I am perfectly contented that she should be angelic to Clive,” she said.
“You are very loyal,” I returned. “But you’ll own that he is getting more out of it than you are. It’s a place, Compton Dally, for wounded heroes rather than for a wounded hero’s wife.”
“Do you mean,” she asked after a moment, “that I oughtn’t to have come?” She had indeed owned to everything in the bewilderment of the question. I laughed at it.
“Oughtn’t to have been with your husband at a time like this! Even Vera could hardly ask that, could she? And that’s my quarrel with her; that it’s the time of all times that you should be together and that she never lets you see him, practically.”
She looked away, and after a moment I saw that her eyes had filled with tears.
“He hasn’t an idea of it,” she said at last.
“That fact doesn’t make you happier, does it?”
“He thinks I’m as happy as he is. He thinks that we are together in it all, and that she is an angel to me, too,” said Mollie. “She always is an angel to me when she sees me.”
“All men are rather stupid when it comes to knowing whether their wives are happy,” I remarked. “I think your Clive is a great dear; but I like you best because you see things he doesn’t. You, for instance, see that Vera isn’t an angel, though she may look like one.”