He liked her still better as she came down in a becoming costume; he particularly liked the agitation her appearance created in the lounging rooms. They got through the day well, and after a dinner with two interesting men—a dinner at which he drank far more than usual—he felt temporarily reconciled to his fate.
But at the end of a week, in which he had so managed it that they were alone as little as possible he had not one illusion left. He did not love her. She did not attract him. She was tiresome through and through. Instead of giving life a new meaning and him a new impetus, she was an added burden, another source of irritation. He admitted to himself that he had been tricked by his senses, as a boy of twenty might have been. He felt like a professional detective who has yielded to a familiar swindling game.
She had grown swiftly fonder of him, won by his mental superiority, by his gentleness exaggerated in his anxiety not basely to make her suffer for his folly. “He’s a real gentleman,” she thought. “His manners are not pretence. I’ve done much better than I fancied.” And she began further to try his nerves by a dog-like obedience. She would not put on a dress without first consulting him. She had no will but his in any way—except one. She insisted upon ordering her own meals. There she did not care what he thought.
Once they were back in London, his chain became invisible and galled him only in imagination. She had an exacting profession, and so had he. When they were together, they would talk about her work, and, as he was interested in it and intelligent about it and she docile and receptive, he was content. While she was of no direct use to him, he found that she was of great indirect use. He worked more steadily, more ambitiously. The ideal woman, which had always been distracting and time-wasting, ceased to have any part in his life.
He turned his attention to play-writing and play-carpentry. He became a connoisseur of food and drink, a dabbler in old furniture and tapestries. He did not regret the event of his first venture in marriage and only venture in love. “As it is, it’s a perfect gem,” he finally came to sum the matter up, “a completed work of art. If I’d had my way, still it must have ended some time, and not so artistically or so comfortably.” When he reflected thus, his waist-line was slowly going.
CHAPTER XIX.
EMILY REFUSES CONSOLATION.
THE Waylands took a small house at Neuilly for the summer, and Emily spent a great deal of time there. She found Theresa less lively but also less jarring than in their boarding-house days. Neither ever spoke of those days, or of Demorest and Marlowe—Theresa, because she had no wish to recall that she had been other than the fashionable and preeminently respectable personage she had rapidly developed into; Emily, because her heart was still sore, and the place where Marlowe had been was still an uncomfortable and at times an aching void.
In midsummer came the third member of the Wayland family—Edgar. Like his father, he had changed, had developed into a type of the respectable radically different from anything of which she had thought him capable. A cleaner mind now looked from his commonplace face, and he watched with approving interest the pleasing, if monotonous, spectacle of his father’s domestic solidity. On the very day on which Emily received her copy of the decree of the Petersville court, he took her out to dinner.
She had sat in her little salon with the three documents in the case before her—the two tangible documents, the marriage certificate and the decree of divorce; and the intangible but most powerful document, her memory of Marlowe from first scene to last. When it was time for her to dress, she went to her bedroom window, tore the two papers into bits and sent them fluttering away over the housetops on the breeze. “The incident is closed,” she said, with a queer short laugh that was also a sob. She had Wayland take her to a little restaurant in the Rue Marivaux, her and Marlowe’s favourite dining place—a small room, with tasteful dark furnishings and rose-coloured lights that made it somewhat brighter than clear twilight.
As they sat there, with the orchestra sending down from a plant-screened alcove high in the wall the softest and gentlest intimations of melody, Emily deliberately gave herself up to the mood that had been growing all the afternoon.