He glanced up in surprise at her tone, and saw her eyes fastened on him, swimming in tears, the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. It came to him with a sort of shock that this was Claudine’s specific case, and not a general problem; that it was not women who wished to leave their husbands, but Claudine who wished to leave Gilbert. He saw that she was a lovely and innocent young thing, unhappy and desperate; he saw suddenly what this might lead to. She would be cast adrift, blamed, gossiped about, always under a sort of cloud. Her position in her own home would be an equivocal one, an unending embarrassment and distress. Hers was not a strong spirit; she couldn’t go forward unsupported. A terrible pain seized him, he turned his eyes away because he couldn’t bear to look at her. And the most intolerable part of his pain was his certainty that she could grow out of her pain; that what she now found unbearable she could one day regard with indifference. She suffered cruelly; she thought her fate was a lamentable and wretched one, and it was really nothing; a trifle, a few moments in her history.
“What would be the sense of my going on?” she asked him. “I don’t make Gilbert happy, and I’m—dreadfully unhappy myself.”
“It isn’t important—to be happy,” said Lance. “The question is, are you useful?”
“No! No, I’m not!”
He pushed away his plate with a nervous gesture.
“You want to know what I think,” he said. “Well, I think you’d better go back to your husband.”
§ ii
She went home, to dress for a euchre party which was to be given in her honour. She felt numb and cold, ready to die of despair. Everyone was against her. No one understood, no one cared, what she suffered. She had appealed in vain to all the people who loved her, and they had all said—“Continue to suffer. It is best for you.”
She had gone to her father for his support in the piano battle.
“Buy me a piano of my own, Father!” she had entreated. “Send it to me as a present. Then the disagreeable old thing can’t object.”