[CHAPTER XVIII]
All this happened on a Thursday, and on the following Wednesday Mrs. Walbridge went out quietly, and sent a telegram to Oliver Wick's office, asking him to come and see her that evening. She was to be alone—alone, it seemed to her distracted mind, for the first time for weeks. For every day and all day some one or other of her family had been with her, trying to persuade her to do the thing her soul detested—to divorce her husband.
Maud was very vehement. Her indignation with her father knew no bounds, and Moreton Twiss agreed with his wife. He was a quick-witted man, with a good gift of words, that he poured out unmercifully over the poor little lady, until she felt literally beaten to death.
"It's perfectly disgusting of him," Maud interrupted once. "I should think you would loathe the sight of him. I'm sure I do."
But Mrs. Walbridge did not loathe the sight of her husband. That is, she did not loathe him appreciably more than she had done for years. They might say what they liked. Billy Gaskell-Walker, too, to her amazement, broke into the most hideous, strange language the moment the subject of his father-in-law came up—called him all the names under the heavens. But nothing made any difference. Paul might sneer and make his most razorlike remarks about his father and the lady whom he wished to make their stepmother; Grisel might cry and beg her mother for her sake to put her father clean away.
"It's like a bad rat, or something," the girl said in her high fastidiousness. "He makes the house unpleasant."
But rail, scorn, revile as they might, Mrs. Walbridge had her standpoint, and stuck to it. She did not believe in divorce, and she wasn't going to divorce her husband. What was more, after three days of exasperated wrangling discussion, she surprised them all by bidding them be quiet.
They were having tea, all of them, in the girls' room. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and the two sons-in-law and Paul were drinking whisky and soda. Mrs. Walbridge, looking very small in the corner of the big sofa, suddenly sat bolt upright and looked angrily round at them.
"Oh, hold your tongues, all of you," she cried in a voice of authority. "You mustn't speak of him like that. I won't have it. He's my husband, not yours. Poor fellow!"
They all stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses, which, indeed, one or two of them privately believed she must have done.