Rod shook his head.
"I'm not particularly sensitive about what you say of him."
"Well, it's true. Did you know that Laska was really in love, very much so, with Phil?"
"I suspected it."
"She was always rather a queer fish," Isabel continued. "Good, generous impulses mixed up with very uncertain ones. She liked them both at first, about fifty-fifty, I think. She may have married Grove simply because he asked her first. He did have a way of making women like him—all kinds of women—for awhile. Perhaps the fact that he was elected to be the biggest toad in the Norquay puddle influenced her. I don't know. I'm sure she thought it a fine thing to be mistress of Hawk's Nest and all it implied. Being chatelaine of a place with dignity, the permanence of age, all the indefinable things that Hawk's Nest makes you feel are part of it, must have appealed to her. But when she found what she was really up against as Grove's wife, how very different it turned out from the thing she dreamed it would be, well, it was the most natural thing in the world for her to look back longingly at Phil and to be intensely sorry for herself. Self-pity is a very demoralizing sort of thing. Phil looked like pure gold alongside what she'd chosen—no woman who lived with one man and knew the other could help seeing and feeling that. To know that she could have had Phil if she'd so chosen made it worse.
"Of course there was no turning back. It isn't done, you know—short of open scandal, or a perfectly insufferable outbreak of some sort. She had cooked her goose. In an extreme she might have divorced Grove. But she couldn't possibly marry his brother afterward. Nobody would have stood for that. So she just had to sweat. And that makes any woman sour, or hard, or reckless.
"You know how Grove performed," Isabel pointed out. "He was a very untidy person—morally."
Rod nodded assent.
"A man like that should never marry," Isabel continued sagely. "He was like a small, very headstrong boy with toys. Women were toys. When he got tired playing with one, he chucked her away and got another. He did that before he married Laska, I suppose. As soon as the novelty of her wore off he went right on—as usual. Everybody knew it. No one could do anything about it. He was fairly adept at keeping his affairs de c[oe]ur out of sight. There were a few explosions, to my personal knowledge. Then Laska finally settled back into a state of contemptuous resentful indifference, and let him go his own gait.
"But it made her suffer intensely, and it has given her a nasty taste in her mouth—and she has all the conventional reactions. If she had kids or work, anything real to take her mind off herself, she might come back to normal. As it is, I shouldn't be surprised at anything that sister of mine might do. She's all tension. She goes on hitting the high spots because she's got to do something. It's rotten, but so long as she can't get a kick out of anything else, why I expect she'll go on. I don't mean that she's dabbling in muck. Her instincts are fairly decent. But she's hovering on the ragged edge."