“Oh, Claude, if you don’t see, you wouldn’t understand if I explained,” she said. “And I can’t quite explain, either.”
“Try,” he said.
“Well, I married you, do you see, and you are master of the house, and I’m mistress, and it isn’t quite the same thing if we go and live with other people. They are angelic, of course, to suggest it. But oh, I wish people wouldn’t be quite so kind—or, rather, that they would mix a little tact with their kindness. They’ve made it hard to refuse, telephoning like that. It’s—it’s like a word-of-mouth invitation for a month ahead. You’ve got to say ‘Yes.’”
Claude took up a rather listless hand of hers that lay on the arm of her chair.
“Ah, then I do understand,” he said, “and I love your reasons. I guessed it before you said it; you want to be alone with me. Well, it’s the same here. But I’ve no doubt they’ll give us a sitting room and all that.”
Though Dora had meant something very like that, it sounded rather dreadful to hear Claude say it, and say also that he had guessed. He oughtn’t to have guessed, although he assured her it was “the same here.” There was an unconscious complacency about his guessing that she did not like. But he went on without pause.
“As for its being tactless,” he said, “I think you’re rather hard on the governor. When a man’s as kind as he can be, and as devoted as he is to you, I don’t think you should say that.”
Claude stuck out his chin a little over this, and Dora, though she knew he was right from his point of view, knew that she had been right too. Kindness, even the most sincere, can easily be embarrassing: it needs refining, like sugar. But that was the sort of thing that Claude could not understand: the tact of good nature had been left out of him just as it had been left out of his father. So her reply was sincere.
“Yes, dear; it was a pity I said that,” she said.
But somehow the admission was bitter; the truth was that it was a pity to say it, because she ought to have been more careful in what she said to him, not because the impulse that prompted her speech was a mistaken one. But all that was unconjectured by him.