"Once I found congenial people. At first I was afraid I'd been stupid so long that I'd lost the power to enjoy. But it came back."
As he talked Courtney's spirits went down and down. Just why, she could not have told. She certainly wished Richard well, had no desire that he should be miserable—at least, no active desire—though, of course, she was human and would have found some satisfaction of vanity in a Richard hard hit by the discovery that his domestic life was in ruins. Still, this vanity of desire to be taken tragically was not with her the passion it is in most men and women. She was far more puzzled than piqued. She could not understand how so serious, so proud a man as he could dismiss a cataclysm thus lightly, no matter how little he cared for her. She had pictured him suffering, suffering intensely; these pictures had given her many a self-reproachful pang, and of real pain too. Now— Looking at this robust, handsome, cheerful person, well fed and well dressed, she felt she had been making a fool of herself.
"Now that I come to examine you," he was saying, "you don't look at all well."
It was a truth of which she had been uncomfortably conscious from her first glance at him. "You ought to have gone away somewhere," he went on. "It's a bad idea to stay in the same place, revolving the same set of ideas too long. Mrs. Leamington taught me that. You'd like her. Your height—much your figure—fairer skin, though—that clear healthy dead white—a lot of really beautiful black hair—the kind with the gloss that's not greasy. She certainly was interesting. I didn't even mind her love of money. She simply had to have it—needed it in her business of being always wonderfully dressed and groomed to the last hair and the last button."
Richard paused to enjoy contemplating the portrait he had painted. Courtney wished to hear more. "She was in your party?"
"She made most of the interest. She cured me of my insanity for work—gave me a wider view—made me stop being a vain ass, thinking always about my own little ambitions and worries. There's a lot that doesn't attract me in women of the world. They're extremely petty at bottom, I find. But at least they do come nearer the truth with their cynicism than we quiet people with our preposterous egotism of solemnity."
Once more her vanity winced—that he should fancy he had to go to Europe and learn of a cynical mercenary of an English woman what she herself had made the law and gospel of her life for years. How feeble her impression upon him had been! True, the only chance one has to make an impression is in the beginning of acquaintanceship; and in their beginning she had been too inexperienced, too captivated with romance—too youthful to have developed much personality. Still, all that did not change the central fact—she had been futile.
"How's the divorce coming on?" he asked abruptly.
Courtney laughed—perhaps not so genuinely as it sounded, but still with real humorous appreciation. "The beautiful English woman—a long silence—then the question about the divorce—that's significant," she explained.
"She's not the marrying kind," replied he, easily enough. "She'll stay free as long as her looks and her money hold out. Then she'll marry some rich chap and go in for society.... She was an interesting woman—a specimen, so to speak. And I owe her a great deal. She taught me a few very important things—about myself—and about women.... What a fraud this so-called education is. One half of fitting a man for life is to teach him to know men, the other half is to teach him to know women. And we actually are taught only about things—and mostly trifles or falsehoods as to them."