No, no, my dear Mr. Gordon, I know Edna too well to accuse her of such petty feelings. She was only hurt at your lack of taste in accenting her own lost bloom by needlessly emphasizing another's possession of what had once been hers.
Yet she called upon the young lady that very day and invited her to luncheon, and even then you indulged in pronounced admiration of the guest's cheeks, gallantly requesting your wife to have the bouquet of carnation pinks removed from the table, as they were so shamed by the complexions of the ladies.
Of course it was gracefully worded in the plural, but your pallid wife could not claim her share of it, and you should have realized the fact. And the reason she could not was that she had sacrificed her health in your service, in giving your children to you, and in losing her lover.
She adores her splendid babies, but she is still a woman and a wife,—though you seem to ignore that she is anything but a mother.
Right about face, Mr. Gordon, and become the lover you were, and jealousy will be driven from your threshold.
It is your own lack of thoughtfulness, your own tactless and tasteless methods with your wife, which have caused the change in her manner. She is not jealous, she is only lonely, heart-hungry, disillusioned.
You are less noble, less considerate, less tender, less sympathetic than she believed. For the man to whom these adjectives can be applied will guard, love, and cherish the wife of his youth, and the mother of his children, before all other considerations; and he will understand how sensitive a fading wife may be, and not confound that sensitiveness with ignoble jealousy.
It is you, Charles Gordon, who must cure your wife of nerves, hysteria, and incipient jealousy, not I.