Presently a diversion was created by Christian's rising to carry Arthur away.
"You need not go," said Miss Gascoigne. "Ring for Phillis. The child has been ill, Sir Edwin, and Mrs. Grey has made herself a perfect slave to him."
"How very—ahem!—charming!" said Sir Edwin Uniacke.
Phillis appeared, but Arthur clung tighter than ever to his step-mother's neck. Nor did she wish to release him.
"I thank you, no. I can carry him quite easily," she replied to Sir Edwin's politely offered help, which was, indeed, the only sentence she had attempted to exchange with him. With her boy in her arms she quitted the room, and did not return thither all the afternoon.
It was impossible she could. Without any prudishness, without the slightest atom of self-distrust or fear to meet him, every womanly feeling in her kept her out of his way. Here was a young man whom she had once ignorantly suffered to make love to her, nay, loved in a foolish, girlish way; a young man whom she now knew—and he must know she knew it—no virtuous girl could or ought to have regarded with a moment's tenderness. Here was he insulting her by coming to her own house—her husband's house, without the permission of either. Had he been humble or shamefaced, she might have pitied him, for all pure hearts have such infinite pity for sinners. She would have wished him repentance, peace, and prosperity, and gone on her way, as he on his, each feeling very kindly to the other, but meeting, and desiring to meet, no more. Now, when he obtruded himself so unhesitatingly, so unblushingly, on the very scene of his misdoings and disgrace, pity was dried up in her heart, and indignation took its place.
"How dare he?" she thought, and nothing else but that. There was not one reviving touch of girlish admiration, not one thrill of self-complacent emotion, to see, what she could not help seeing, under his studiedly courteous manner, that he had forgotten, and meant her to feel he had forgotten, not a jot of the past. Whatever the episode of Susan Bennett might mean—if, indeed, such a man was not capable of carrying on a dozen such little episodes—his manner to Christian plainly showed that he admired her still; that he saw no difference between the pretty maiden Christian Oakley and the matron Christian Grey, and expressed this fact by tender tones and glances, alas! only too familiarly known by her of old. "How dared he?"
Christian was a very simple woman. She knew nothing at all of that fashionable world which, in its blasé craving for excitement, delights, both in life and in books, to tread daintily on the very confines of guilt. She was not ignorant. She knew what sin was, as set forth in the Ten Commandments, but she understood absolutely nothing of that strange leniency or laxity which now-a-days makes vice so interesting as to look like virtue, or mixes vice and virtue together in a knot of circumstances until it is difficult to distinguish right from wrong.
Christian Grey was a wife. Therefore, both as wife and as woman, it never occurred to her as the remotest possibility that she could indulge in one tender thought of any man not her husband, or allow any man to lift up the least corner of that veil of matronly dignity with which every married woman, under whatever circumstances she has married or whatever may befall her afterward, ought to enwrap herself forever. "When I am dead," says Shakspeare's Queen Katherine,
"Let me be used with honor. Strew me over With maiden flowers, that all the world may know I was a chaste wife to my grave."