"You think I behave badly to Dick? Oh, Christina!—you are displeased with me?"
They were very sincere with each other, these two, and bared their souls to each other relentlessly.
"Only because you are so dear to me, Milly." Mrs. Drent flushed a little as she looked tenderly at her friend. "Only because I want to see you always right, exquisitely right. You make me uncomfortable when you are not. He has done you no wrong. Why should you treat him as you did this morning, using me as a foil to show him his own stupidity? Not that I do find him stupid, Milly; only very, very simple."
"I know it! Oh, I know it!" Milly wailed. "If only he had done me a wrong it would be so much easier! He irritates me so unspeakably, and I seem to feel it more, now that I have you. That laboured chaffing of you at breakfast—how could you have borne it? I can't pretend amusement, and chaff is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I'm horrid—I know it; but it is the long, long accumulations of repressed exasperation that have made me so—worse than exasperations. I remember, during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful mistake—I remember once kissing him and saying something playful that hid an appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassurance. And do you know, he answered me with a chaffing jest—a stupid, stupid jest—some piece of would-be gallant folly. It was like a dagger!"
"Perhaps it pleased him so much, your kissing him, that it made him shy," Christina suggested, but Milly said:—"Dick shy! Oh no, he is not sensitive enough for shyness. He doesn't feel things at all as you, with your exquisiteness, imagine. He isn't shy at all, and I'm afraid he is sometimes immensely, hideously stupid."
After all, as Christina came to see, Dick's inevitable loss was her own gain. Milly, who could not be her husband's, was hers, almost as a child might have been. Christina, for the first time in her life, knew the intoxicating experience of being sought out and needed. It was Milly who turned to her; Milly who put out appealing hands, like a lonely child; who nestled her head on her shoulder, contentedly sighing, as she begged her please, please not to go until she had to—and couldn't she, wouldn't she, stay on until the winter?
Why shouldn't she? Her own life was empty. It ended in her passing most of the winter with Milly in the country after Dick had gone off to India. It was a blissful winter, the happiest, in reality, that Christina had ever known, though she was not aware of this nor aware that it was the first time in her life that she was the recipient of as much devotion as she gave. They read and rode and walked and talked and carried on energetic reforms and charities in the village. Christina was full of ardent enthusiasms which infected Milly. In spite of her physical delicacy, for she had a weak heart, she showed an enterprise and endurance that Milly was not capable of. The winter went by and life was full of significance.
Then Christina asked Milly to come and stay with her in London for the spring, and so, by degrees, they both came to think of home as the being together. Christina's little house in Sloane Street became a centre of discriminating hospitality; they had an equal talent for selection and recognition, and Milly possessed the irradiating attractive qualities that Christina lacked. Together they became something of a touchstone for the finer, more recondite elements in the vortex of the larger London life. All their people seemed to come to them through some pleasant affinity, the people who had done clever things; the people who, better still, shone only with latent possibilities and were the richer for their reticences; and dear, comfortable, unexacting people who were not particularly clever, but responsive, appreciative and genuine.
Christina still wrote a little, but not so much. She and Milly studied and travelled and, in the country, at the proper seasons, rusticated. With all its harmony, their life did not want its more closely knitting times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed her through the long crisis, or when Christina's heart showed alarming symptoms and hurried them away to German specialists.
There were funny little quarrels, too, funny to look back upon, though very painful at the moment; for Milly could be fretful, and Christina violent in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when, holding each other's hands, they laughed at each other, each eager to take the blame. Certain defects they came to recognize and to take into account, tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection, seeming achieved. Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her, neither books nor music nor people, not even Christina, and when, sunken in a deep armchair, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt Christina,—Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly was not aware of their hurting,—and she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. But she did not quite understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from Milly.