“But you’ve been very unkind,” said she. “I hate unkindness. I am never unkind.”
“I know, and I have asked your forgiveness. I cannot do more than that.”
Never before this evening of her supreme success had her character, the thing she really was, so betrayed itself. She was like a spoiled child: everything that she wanted must be given her, and if she did not want a European war, that must be stopped instantly, because she disliked it. Anyone who did not at once provide her with what she desired, who did not glory in her pleasure, thinking it an honour to contribute to it, who did not agonize over her disappointments, again thinking it an honour wholly to sacrifice himself to averting and nullifying them, was a callous monster, who must not at once be forgiven, even if he professed penitence. The growing intoxication of those last weeks, culminating to-night, had gone to her head like some new wine, and it had become everyone’s duty, her husband’s first of all, to pet and pat and admire her, to go “wholly from themselves,” in their adoration of her, and to shield her from everything that could threaten to vex her. Her concentrated self-centredness had suddenly shot up in flower, like the aloe that stores within it, before its flowering, the energy of twenty years.
“But how do I know you really feel for me?” she asked, wanting to get a more complete and abject surrender from him. “It is easy to say you are sorry: that costs you nothing.”
Right at the back of her mind, not vividly presented to it, was the thought of some sables, which even he had refused to buy for her at the price demanded. He had bought her some silver-fox instead, as a means of diplomatic delay. She thought of the sables....
“The news to-night will cost me enough,” said he, “unless I am very careful and also very quick.”
“You are thinking only of your money—that is all that concerns you,” she said. “As if it were not easy enough for you to make more money. But you do not feel for me. All my pleasure is taken away, and you hint that I must lose half my friends, too. You do not care for friends: they mean nothing to you, and you cannot understand my misery. You tell me I shall have to say what my sympathies are, and if they are German, I shall lose my English friends, and if they are English, I shall lose my German friends. That’s what you mean, and you think that to me it is only like drawing a card out of a pack. I have no quarrel with anybody: I want to be friends with all. Besides, there is not war yet. You may be wrong about it: you mustn’t think you are always right. And if you are wrong, you have been making me miserable for nothing.”
It was no use reasoning with the unreasonable, and he wanted to keep the activity of his faculties for something more remunerative than that.
“Well, then, we will hope I am wrong,” he said, “and then my ownest heart’s-dearest Aline will be happy again. Now, darling, you must go to bed at once. It will be dawn in an hour or two, and if you do not get some sleep, your eyes will be dull to-morrow, and that will never do. Leave me now: I must sit up and think and work for an hour more, and all the time it will be you I am thinking and working for. You know how I make my eyes dull for your brightness, you Joy of mine.”
She was content enough with that to condescend to be comforted. It pleased her insatiable self-centredness to think that her husband would be working for her while she slept. She rose and kissed him.