“I expected it, of course,” he said at last gravely. “The pity of it is that her little revolution was so hopeless from the beginning. As long as a woman loves her husband, she can not hope for happiness, nor even for forgetfulness.”
“Oh, she does not love her husband any more,” said Eveley confidently. “Not a bit. She is over that long ago.”
“That was the whole trouble,” he insisted. “If she had not loved him, she could have stood it and gone her way. But loving him, the situation was impossible for a woman of spirit and pride. Well, there is always one to pay in every triangle, and this time the bill comes to me. But I had anticipated that from the beginning. She is a wonderful woman.”
“Do you think she will go back to her husband?” asked Eveley breathlessly.
“I hardly think so. She might as well, though; perhaps it would be better. She can not be happy without him, and she was certainly not happy with him. It is only a choice of miseries. As long as she loves him, she will suffer for it. I begin to think that one who loves can not be happy.”
“Oh, yes, one can. One is,” asserted Eveley positively.
“Perhaps I should say, when one is married to it,” he added, with a sober smile for her assurance.
Then he had gone away, and when Lem’s pleadings had suddenly ceased, Eveley felt that the little tempest would live its life, and die its death, and perhaps Miriam at least would find happiness in the lull that followed.
So it was something of a shock to have her pleasant Sunday morning nap disturbed by Lem pounding briskly upon her window.
“Get up, immediately,” he said in an assertive voice quite different from his futile and inane pleadings of a short while before. “Hurry, Eveley, I want you. Dress for motoring, my car is here. I shall wait in the garden—give you ten minutes.”