“I am a little bit useful—to Katie.”
“But I can’t stand it, Rosaleen, if you’re not happy. I’m going to make you happy. I’m going to arrange for a divorce for you——”
“No, you’re not!” she cried. “I wouldn’t have it!”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a horrid, wrong idea,” she had insisted. “With his being blind—and everything....”
You could never argue with that confounded woman. She never listened to the voice of reason; she listened to something else—God knows what. And every act in her life had to be in conformity with this subtle and rigid authority. She never thought, she never puzzled, about what was right and what was wrong; she simply knew at once, by instinct. And that was the end of it. She lived by the rule of a beautiful propriety; she would never do anything which did not befit her.
Nick had given up, long ago. And now, he had almost come to believe that her way, if not the right way, was certainly one of the right ways of living, and that Rosaleen divorced would not have been quite Rosaleen. Sometimes, when he grew intolerably lonely for her, or when the sight of her in her white apron flying about waiting on other men incensed and distressed him more than usual, he would rail at her “obstinate, petty conventionality.” But she had none the less succeeded in making him comprehend her point of view; not with words, because she was not gifted with speech, but in some way of her own, her feeling that in divorcing Lawrence and marrying Nick she would lose her own especial quality.
“It’s all right for lots of people,” she said. “I haven’t got any particular prejudice against it. It’s only a feeling.... I—well, I just can’t, that’s all.”