During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests.
“I am awfully hungry. Isn’t it almost lunch-time?” he said, as they paused.
Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. “It only wants five minutes.”
Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory.
“How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary,” he said, looking down at the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined her husband, putting her arm through his.
“Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter,” she smiled at him; and although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty—a rather sickly, pallid pleasure—and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of hurting her.
After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the sympathy that allows itself no words.
There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia’s lonely complacency—a pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness.
“Mary is so disagreeable to-day,” said Alicia, as they walked slowly across the lawn. “She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of other people’s worthlessness.”
Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the revealment of Alicia’s shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not found it out—had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was born so.