For an instant Margaret looked at him in silence. Then she insisted coldly, “To her, perhaps. She thinks that you are in love with her.”
“Well, I suppose I’ve been a fool,” he confessed, after a struggle, “but you are making too much of it.”
Yes, she was making too much of it; she realized this more poignantly than he would ever be able to do. She felt like an actress who has endowed a comic part with the gesture of high tragedy. It was not, she saw clearly now, that she had misunderstood George, but that she had overplayed life.
“We met last summer at Ogunquit.” She became aware presently that he was still making excuses and explanations about nothing. “You couldn’t go about much, you know, and we went swimming and played golf together. I liked her, and I could see that she liked me. When we came away I thought we’d break it off, but somehow we didn’t. I saw her several times in New York. Then she came here unexpectedly, and I offered her that old villa nobody would rent. You don’t understand such things, Margaret. It hadn’t any more to do with you than—than—” He hesitated, fished in the stagnant waters of his mind, and flung out abruptly, “than golf has. It was just a sort of—well, sort of—recreation.”
Recreation! The memory of Rose Morrison’s extravagant passion smote her sharply. How glorified the incident had appeared in the girl’s imagination, how cheap and tawdry it was in reality. A continual compromise with the second best, an inevitable surrender to the average, was this the history of all romantic emotion? For an instant, such is the perversity of fate, it seemed to the wife that she and this strange girl were united by some secret bond which George could not share—by the bond of woman’s immemorial disillusionment.
“I wouldn’t have had you hurt for worlds, Margaret,” said George, bending over her. The old gentle voice, the old possessive and complacent look in his sleepy blue eyes, recalled her wandering senses. “If I could only make you see that there wasn’t anything in it.”
She gazed up at him wearily. The excitement of discovery, the exaltation, the anguish, had ebbed away, leaving only gray emptiness. She had lost more than love, more than happiness, for she had lost her belief in life.
“If there had been anything in it, I might be able to understand,” she replied.
He surveyed her with gloomy severity. “Hang it all! You act as if you wanted me to be in love with her.” Then his face cleared as if by magic. “You’re tired out, Margaret and you’re nervous. There’s Winters now. You must try to eat a good dinner.”
Anxious, caressing, impatient to have the discussion end and dinner begin, he stooped and lifted her in his arms. For an instant she lay there without moving, and in that instant her gaze passed from his face to the red lilies and the uncurtained window beyond.