“Where is her husband?”
“He’s been living in hotels in Europe,” she said, with evident enjoyment of Mauney’s astonishment. “He left her because she insisted on keeping up a friendship with another man. Just separated—no divorce. Well, I think seven years of running a boarding-house has more or less broken Gertrude’s proud spirit. Manton has been writing her for the past year, trying to resume married relations with her, and she has finally given in. She expects him home in a couple of weeks and I imagine that will be the end of seventy-three. She cried up in my room the other night, real Magdalen tears, and I believe she has learned her lesson.”
“I hope she’ll be happy,” Mauney said. “It’s plainly another case of false rebellion. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.”
“I know just what you mean,” Freda replied. “There’s some sort of uppishness about her. She wasn’t strong enough to endure the bonds of marriage life—”
“That’s it—so she rebelled,” interjected Mauney. “But her rebellion was merely the hysterical reaction of an inadequate personality to its environment. Sooner or later with such people there comes some sort of circumstance that proves the falseness of their rebellion. They wilt.”
“But on the other hand,” continued Freda, with an aspect of some inspiration in her eyes, “there are others who are true rebels. Some of us were made to be perpetually out of gear with things. Our rebellion is genuine. We never turn back. We can’t, that’s all. I wish you could understand me—”
“I do,” he said eagerly, smiling into her eyes. “I understand completely. I can’t help feeling that we are in the same boat. I’ve never yet found any kind of life which completely satisfied me. Take this book of mine. The fun was all in writing it, Freda.”
She blushed at the sound of her first name. It had slipped past Mauney’s lips, but he saw no reason to apologize.
“Nothing suits me,” he continued. “The first part of my life I lived on a farm. Nothing would suit me, but an education. Now I’ve got it—and—well, it does not satisfy.”