"And it is terrible for him if he still loves you."
"Oh," said Milly, with another sigh, "if you can call it love. He is rather dismayed by the situation; sorry that we don't hit it off better, as he would express it; jocosely resigned to what he would call my unkindness and queerness. But as for tragedy, suffering;—one can't associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I haven't to reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and, Heaven knows! I don't reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine. Marriage and a wife were incidents—incidents only—to him, and if they have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies. I can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and his house, I entertain his friends, I give him his tea at breakfast and a decorous kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country. One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant jungles and not requiring too many tête-à-têtes at breakfast of me."
"He is probably very good and kind," said Mrs. Drent, "but it is incredible that such a man should be married to such a woman as you."
Again Milly gazed for a moment, aware of inappropriateness. "You have a very high ideal of marriage, haven't you?" she said. Mrs. Drent's husband had died five years before, and her baby when it was born. She wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive always, and, unobtrusively, she was known to be inconsolable. Yet Milly had heard it whispered that Gilbert Drent had married her for her money and that, charming person though he had been, she had passionately idealized him. There was, therefore, with these memories at the back of her mind, something painful as well as pathetic to her in the voice in which Mrs. Drent, crimsoning deeply, said: "My own marriage was ideal. I don't understand marriage unless it is ideal."
There was a silence after that for a moment and then Milly said, "It must be wonderful to have such a memory. All I know is that I wish with all my heart I had never married Dick, and I believe with all my heart that one shouldn't marry unless everything is there."
"That is it," said Mrs. Drent, "everything must be there for it to be right;—affinity, and understanding, and devotion. Some women can find enough in the mere fact of a home and a shared life to be satisfied without them; but not a woman like you."
"I think you idealize me," Milly said smiling a little sadly; "but I believe in that too. I don't claim at all any remarkable individuality; but what I have Dick doesn't understand at all, doesn't even see. He goes blundering about the dullest, most distant parks and preserves of a castle; that is as near as he ever gets to the castle, such as it is, of my personality. And he doesn't really care about the castle; it hardly worries him that he can't find it. There might be wonderful pictures on its walls, and jewels in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but even if he got inside and were able to see and hear, he wouldn't care a bit about them; he would say: 'Awfully nice,' and look for the smoking-room. And there," said Milly, pressing her hands together while her eyes filled suddenly with tears, "there is the little tragedy. For of course every woman thinks that she has pictures and jewels and music, and longs—oh longs!—to show them to the one, the one person who will love to see and hear. And when she finds that no one sees or hears, or knows, even, that there is anything to look for, then the music dies, and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow dim, and at last everything magical vanishes from life and she sees herself, not as an enchanted castle, but as a first-class house in Mayfair, with all the latest improvements;—as much a matter of course, as much a convenience, as unmysterious and as unalluring as the telephone, the hot water pipes and the electric lighting. It is only as if in a dream—a far, far dream—that she remembers the castle, and feels, sometimes, within her, the ruins, the empty ruins."
"Oh—my dear!" breathed Mrs. Drent. It was as if she couldn't help it, as if, shaken from her passionate reserve, she must show her very heart. She leaned round the table and took one of Milly's hands. "Don't—don't let the magic vanish! There's nothing else in life! All the rest is death. It's only when we are in the castle—with our music and our pictures and our jewels—that we are alive. You know it; you feel it; it's what makes the difference between the real and the unreal people. You are one of the real ones, I saw it at once; you aren't meant to wither out and to become crisp and shallow. Don't cease to believe in the pictures, the jewels, the music. They are there. I see. I hear."
"How—sweet of you!" faltered Milly.
She was startled, she was touched, she, who rarely felt it, felt shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was observing her, and had known, for all the other's reserve, that the observation was not antagonistic. Something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel that it would be easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's miseries and desolations. But the sudden leap of spiritual fire found her unprepared. She was a little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside Mrs. Drent's belief in it. There had been something pleasant in the tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the thought of that sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments; but Mrs. Drent had seen only the tragedy; and had felt the danger of withering, of becoming acquiescent and commonplace, with an intensity of which she herself was incapable. Such response, such understanding, might well take one's breath away.