When Nancy Fazackerly told me this, which she did long afterwards, I said it was impossible. Men—at any rate Englishmen—don’t say these things.
But Nancy only repeated that Bill had said them, and had said them in a way that was absolutely natural, so that she had not been surprised at the time—only afterwards.
“You do understand, don’t you?” Bill said. “Her marriage to Harter was a mistake. He hasn’t been happy either. And, of course, one can imagine how rotten it is for two people to remain together when they’ve come to dislike one another and when, anyway, they never had a great deal in common to begin with.”
“Why did they marry then?” murmured Nancy; not censoriously, as Lady Annabel might have said it, but as one sorrowfully propounding for the hundredth time an insoluble problem.
“Well, you know, if you think of the way most people are brought up, it isn’t surprising there are so many unhappy marriages,” Bill remarked. “Until quite lately, women weren’t told more than half the truth about marriage, were they? And anyway—it isn’t talked about as a serious thing now, is it? People make a sort of furtive joke of it ... le mariage n’est pas l’amour, and that sort of thing.... And it ought to be quite different. It ought to have a different place in the scale of relative values. As it is, of course, most people don’t even know what they’re missing, because they haven’t been educated up to wanting it. But Diamond does know, you see.”
“Did she always, do you suppose?”
“More or less. She knew underneath, I think, but she wouldn’t let herself face it.”
“And if she hadn’t met you?”
“I don’t know,” said Bill gently.
Then Mrs. Fazackerly, very much in earnest and hating to say it, made one of the moral efforts of her life and asked him if he really thought that his—his attraction—his strong attraction, if he liked—to this woman older than himself, was anything more than the accident of falling in love, to which every normal man or woman is liable. She was frightened when she said it, because she thought that he would repent of his confidence to her and think her unworthy of it.