“If you don’t take care, Christina, you will be a d——d bore one of these days,” was his remark, as he lit a cigarette.
Christina looked after his retreating figure with an expression on her face that was not wholly anger. There was a touch of something like pity in her look—the pity was for herself. She was, in truth, far from being easily accustomed to the fact that already her power over her husband was gone. Such a realization was too humiliating for her to grasp all at once. She had made such a thorough conquest of Mark Wentworth at the beginning that she may be forgiven for imagining her sovereignty would be perpetual.
Her reign had, as a matter of fact, been short with Mark Wentworth.
Constancy was a virtue lacking in him altogether, and he had changed his flirtations as easily as he had changed his garments. Marriage had no more significance to the man than any of these former flirtations, and he had only made Christina his wife because she was a clever woman, and because Valentine had ventured to thwart him, and, by consequence, had driven him to extremes.
Once married, Christina might have worked her influence beneficially had she been so minded, but Christina cared not the toss of a button whether her husband drank himself into an early grave or not. She cared only for such things as concerned herself.
She could and did quarrel with Mark over matters that reflected on her position as his wife, but as to what was good or evil to himself as an individual Christina troubled herself not at all. True, she objected to seeing him in a dazed, or maybe an excited condition, from the effects of drink, but if he were ill afterwards she gave him no pity.
With all this, she had still imagined, up to quite a late date, that she held her old place in his estimation, and when the moment came and proved to her that Mark had as little concern for herself as she had for him, she was simply mortified.
This mortification was the most disagreeable because it was impossible for Christina not to see that where she failed another could succeed.
Her bitterness against Grace increased a hundredfold. If she could have devised some means of letting Grace feel the burden of this bitterness, she would have been happy. In this, however, as in all, she knew that Valentine ranged himself between her and his sister; to reach Grace, therefore, she must touch Valentine first, and to approach this man in such a way as to satisfy at once her vanity and her hate, was the one task that Christina set herself to fulfill, if possible, before many more months had gone.