‘So is Mr. Monckton,’ was her unexpected answer.
Really it was like a blow in the face. It stopped him short. It must be her condition. But all that day the attitude continued, the strange, almost defiant attitude, and Stephen could only go into his study and pray that her heart might be softened, and her eyes opened to see things as they truly were.
Such a grave misfortune—she did not of course know how grave, how terrible it was—the first in their married life, and to take it this way, hardening her heart against the sympathy and understanding he and his mother offered her in such boundless measure, and persisting, with an obstinacy he wouldn’t have dreamed her capable of, in upholding what her mother had done! True she said very little, but that little was all obstinate. She was quite unlike her usual self to his mother, too, whose one thought was to comfort, and would not admit that there was anything to be comforted about. And when that night he got into bed, and drew her to his heart in the exquisite contact of the body that had always till then soothed every trouble of the spirit, and she came apparently willingly, and clung to him, and was his own dear wife as he thought, and, happily sure of this, he whispered that he hoped she had remembered to pray for her poor mother, it was a grievous shock to feel her shrink away from him and hear her say she hadn’t—not more than usual, not more than her childhood’s ‘God bless my mummy,’ and most grievous to have her ask him, just as if they weren’t in bed but downstairs conversing in their clothes, just as if they weren’t in the sacred place and at the sacred moment never yet profaned by talk of anything but love, why he really thought it so dreadful for her mother to marry again.
‘Do you not see it is terrible to marry some one young enough to be your son?’ he had asked sternly—he couldn’t have believed he would ever have to be stern with his own love in such a place, at such an hour.
And she had answered: ‘But is it any more terrible than marrying some one young enough to be your daughter?’
Virginia had answered that. His Virginia. In bed. In his very arms.
VI
Stephen was completely crushed by this. It was like the things children say, unanswerable in its simple rightness, and yet, the grown-up world being what it is, all wrong.
Virginia was nearer the fount of truth than he was. Where he stood, thirty years further from it, its waters naturally were muddier; but there they were, and had to be dealt with including their mud, and not as if they remained for ever, as she so near the source supposed, crystal clear.
On the other hand he couldn’t do without his wife. He owed her everything, and above all he owed her his return to youth. She had come and released him from the darkening prison of deepening middle age. He worshipped her more than he knew. For instance, up to this he hadn’t known he was wax in her hands, he had imagined he led, guided, was in absolute authority; now suddenly he knew he was wax. When his mother-in-law had dared compare his marriage with hers, the thing had been the deadliest outrage. Virginia pointed her finger at it, and instead of being outraged he was crushed—crushed by the truth as she saw it, crushed by the knowledge that in her clear young eyes he hadn’t, in his condemnation of her mother’s action, a leg to stand on.