“Our keeping her on a while longer, and making friends with her. I’d like it tremendously if you’d be a friend to her, because you could do more for her than anyone.”
“More than you?”
“Oh, I’d do my bit too,” he assured her, innocently. “I could put her up to a lot of things, seeing her every day as I should. But you’re the one I should really count on.”
Because the words hurt her more than any she could utter; she said, quietly: “I suppose you remember sometimes that after all she’s your wife.”
He sprang to his feet. Knowing that he did at times remember it he tried to deny it. “No, I don’t. She’s not. I don’t admit it. I don’t acknowledge it. If you care anything about me, Barbe, you’ll never say that again.”
He came and knelt beside her, taking her hands and kissing them. Laying his head in her lap, he begged to be caressed, as if he had been a dog.
Nevertheless by half past nine that evening he was at home, sitting by the fireside with Letty, and beginning his special part in the great experiment.
“She’s not my wife,” he kept repeating to himself poignantly, as he walked up the Avenue from the Club; “she’s not—she’s not. But she is a poor child toward whom I’ve undertaken grave responsibilities.”
Because the responsibilities were grave, and she was a poor child, his attitude toward her began to be paternal. It was the more freely paternal because Barbe approved of what he was undertaking. Had she disapproved he might have undertaken it all the same, but he couldn’t have done it with this whole-heartedness. He would have been haunted by the fear of her displeasure; whereas now he could let himself go.