I felt bitterly annoyed with myself that this news did not cause me any grief. I have been this man's wife for five months, and his going into danger in a far country leaves me cold. But I did, indeed, grieve for his mother. Her many good qualities came back to me. This will be a terrible blow to her.
I looked up at the little pastel by La Tour. The sprightly French
Marquise smiled back at me.
"Good-bye," I said. "You, pretty Marquise, would call me a fool because to-day Antony is not my lover. But I—oh, I am glad!"
He did not even kiss my finger-tips last night. We parted sadly after a storm of words neither he nor I had ever meant to speak.
"Il s'en faut bien que nous commissions tout ce que nos passions nous font faire!"
Once more La Rochefoucauld has spoken truth.
Why the situation is as it is I cannot tell. In my bringing up, the idea of taking a lover after marriage seemed a more or less natural thing, and not altogether a deadly sin, provided the affair was conducted sans fanfaronnade, without scandal. It was not that grandmamma and the Marquis actually discussed such matters in my hearing, but the general tone of their conversation gave that impression.
Marriage, as the Marquis said to me, was not a pleasure—it is a means to an end, a tax of society. The agréments of life came afterwards. I had always understood he had been grandmamma's lover.
Once I heard him express this sentiment when I was supposed to be reading my book: The marriage vows, he said, were the only ones a gentleman might break without great blemish to his honor. This was the atmosphere I had always lived in, and since my wedding the people of my own class that I have met do not seem to hold different views. Lord Tilchester is Babykins's lover. The Duke has passed on from several women, and, to come nearer home, there are my husband and Lady Grenellen. Only Lady Tilchester seems noble and above all these earthly things.
Why did I hesitate? I do not know. There is a something in my spirit which cried out against the meanness of it, the degradation, the sacrilege. I could not break my word to Augustus. Oh! I could not stoop to desecrate myself, and to act for all the future—hours of deceit.