If this description was not altogether consistent with the home life as she had observed it when she first came to live with them, Blanche ascribed the discrepancy to her want of perception, or to the decent deceptions he had practised in order to keep up before the world a pretence of domestic amiability. She was convinced he was quite sincere in what he told her. He was, as a matter of fact, talking himself into a belief in Pamela’s coldness. He began to feel genuinely sorry for himself in the rôle of the unappreciated husband divorced from the sympathies of an indifferent wife. Pamela was indifferent of late, he reflected; she had grown strangely independent of him.
“You see how it is?” he said, and gazed appealingly into the dark calm eyes that were watching him in wondering earnestness, while their owner listened compassionately to this tale of married infelicity. “It’s all the children with her. I don’t count in the ordinary sense. God knows why I married! I’ve half a mind to chuck it—to disappear. There are times when I feel things can’t go on like this much longer. A man hates being thwarted. That’s what I am,—thwarted continually.”
He dug his heel into the ground and uprooted little tufts of grass and kicked them irritably aside.
“If it wasn’t for you,” he said, “I couldn’t stick it. You are so sweet and understanding and considerate. When I am with you I can let myself out, and that eases the strain. Don’t you ever marry, Blanche,” he added abruptly. “It’s the very devil to be tied hand and foot for life... the very devil.”
“I am never likely to have the opportunity,” she answered in her cool, indifferent manner. “I don’t get on with men. They always want to be amused, and I have nothing to say to them. No man, save you, has ever troubled to talk to me.”
“I’m glad of that,” he said. “It’s selfish of me; but I like to feel that I have your undisputed friendship. I’m a monopolist. A woman who held me alone in her thoughts could have the best of me,—the whole of me. I would give up everything for her.”
“I suppose most men think that of themselves,” observed Blanche. “But a man’s world holds other things than love—a woman’s world also, for that matter, though it is not generally considered to. No person gets the whole of another person; at most one only shares.”
“That’s a frigid philosophy,” he said. “You are too young to be cynical.”
“I am young only in years,” she answered. “I’ve never had any youth. I don’t know what it is to feel girlish. All my life has been spent in looking after other people’s babies, with an insufficient education to fit me for anything else. That sort of life doesn’t tend to make one youthful.”
“It’s a rotten shame,” he declared. “I’d like to take you out of it, and give you a right good time. I’d teach you how to be young.”