"To begin with," she began again with impetus, "you spared me the catalogue of the defects of age; I know them. One grows skinny—my sort—the complexion fades, the teeth stick out. And then there is the boredom. I know it; one is bored . . . bored . . . bored! You can't tell me anything I don't know about that. I'm thirty. I know what to expect. You'd like to have told me, Father, only you were afraid of taking away from your famous man of the world effect—you'd like to have told me that one can insure against the boredom and the long, skinny teeth by love of husband and child. The home stunt! I believe it! I do quite believe it. Only I hate my husband . . . and I hate . . . I hate my child."
She paused, waiting for exclamations of dismay or disapprobation from the priest. These did not come.
"Think," she said, "of all the ruin that child has meant for me; the pain in bearing him and the fear of death."
"Of course," the priest said, "child-bearing is for women a very terrible thing."
"I can't say," Mrs. Tietjens went on, "that this has been a very decent conversation. You get a girl . . . fresh from open sin, and make her talk about it. Of course you're a priest and mother's mother; we're en famille. But Sister Mary of the Cross at the convent had a maxim: 'Wear velvet gloves in family life.' We seem to be going at it with the gloves off."
Father Consett still didn't say anything.
"You're trying, of course, to draw me," Sylvia said. "I can see that with half an eye. . . . Very well then, you shall. . . ."
She drew a breath.
"You want to know why I hate my husband. I'll tell you; it's because of his simple, sheer immorality. I don't mean his actions; his views! Every speech he utters about everything makes me—I swear it makes me—in spite of myself, want to stick a knife into him, and I can't prove he's wrong, not ever, about the simplest thing. But I can pain him. And I will. . . . He sits about in chairs that fit his back, clumsy, like a rock, not moving for hours. . . . And I can make him wince. Oh, without showing it. . . . He's what you call . . . oh, loyal. . . . There's an absurd little chit of a fellow. . . . oh, Macmaster . . . and his mother . . . whom he persists in a silly, mystical way in calling a saint . . . a Protestant saint! . . . And his old nurse, who looks after the child . . . and the child itself. . . . I tell you I've only got to raise an eyelid . . . yes, cock an eyelid up a little when anyone of them is mentioned . . . and it hurts him dreadfully. His eyes roll in a sort of mute anguish. . . . Of course he doesn't say anything. He's an English country gentleman."
Father Consett said: