"It was all for me, to give me what he thought I wanted, the things my friends have. He could not bear to deprive me of anything."
Yet he had deprived her of the thing she valued most in life: her pride. He had committed the sin unpardonable. He had, as the English put it, "let her down." She, Joan Darcy, in whom pride was the dominant trait, pride of race, of intellect, of character—she was the wife of a defaulter, a common thief!
Despite people's marked kindness and consideration toward her, she fancied she knew what they were saying: "An extravagant wife. A woman who neglected her home and her husband."
But of the charge of extravagance at least she was able to acquit herself. The iron of poverty had entered too early and too deep into her soul for that. She knew that dressing, for instance, cost her far less than it cost any woman of her acquaintance. She had always made taste and skill take the place of money there, and in other ways. Much that was unusual in her little house she had done herself, staining walls, painting woodwork, covering furniture. Where her neighbors employed several servants, she did very well with one; and if she left much of her household management in Ellen's hands, it was because she knew them to be more experienced than her own.
"No," she told herself, puzzling the thing over, "we have simply cut our coat according to other people's cloth—And how was I to know?"
It is the cry of many a startled wife whose husband has tried to keep on his shoulders the burden two should share: How was I to know?
She was comforted to think that no tradespeople at least were suffering from their catastrophe; she owed not a dollar in the world.... Here Joan winced, recalling her determination that there should be no "Indians" in the annals of the Blair family. Archie, in order that she might pay bills promptly, had allowed her to pay them with other people's money!
His own attitude was incredible to her. He seemed not particularly ashamed, nor even down-cast; if anything, rather relieved that the strain was over. The enormity of the thing he had done did not appear to impress him. He was more like a man who has bet too heavily at the races, but means to show himself a good loser. For the first time Joan considered seriously the mystery surrounding his birth. Emily Carmichael had been right—it was "brave" to marry a man of such doubtful antecedents. Who knew what handicaps were his to fight, what heritage of moral obliquity?
There was after all a certain safety in good birth, she thought—forgetting that traditions and fine breeding had not sufficed to keep her own father from a slight moral obliquity, such as had permitted him to speculate with trust-funds. (Of the Major's earlier misadventure she never learned.)
And then a sudden rush of reaction came over her. Archie—and moral obliquity! It was as impossible to associate the two as to associate a fine dog with treachery. He had simply, for her sake, chosen to take his long chance and abide by the consequences. An act more gallant, more blindly, foolishly, needlessly sacrificial, had never been laid upon the altar of love. And yet—she could not forgive him for it.