He went to his desk and she stood looking at him. There was still the charm of youth, even freshness, in her beauty—and she was not unconscious of the fact.
And he—he was handsome, distinguished looking and certainly did not suggest age or the approach of age; but in his hair, so grey at the temples, in the stern, rather haughty lines of his features, in the weariness of his eyes, there was not a vestige of youth. “How he has worked for me and for his ideals,” she thought, sadly yet proudly. “Ah, he is indeed a great man, and my husband!” And she bent over him and kissed him on an impulse to a kind of tenderness which was now so strange to her that it made her feel shy.
“And what a radical you’ll be,” she laughed, after a moment’s silence. “What a radical, what a democrat!”
“When?” He was flushing a little and avoided her eyes.
“When you’re free—really the proprietor—able to express your own views, all your own views. We shall become outcasts.”
“I wonder,” he replied slowly, “does a rich man own his property or does it own him?”
For an instant he had an impulse of his old longing for sympathy, for companionship. She was now thirty-six and, save for an expression of experience, of self-control, seemed hardly so much as thirty. But with the years, with the habit of self-restraint, with instinctive rather than conscious realisation of his indifference toward her, had come a chill perceptible at the surface and permeating her entire character. In her own way she had become as self-absorbed, as ambitious as he.
He looked at her, felt this chill, sighed, smiled at himself. Yes, he was alone—and he preferred to be alone.