“Why not ... leave him?”
And for a while no sound but the scream and plash of a water-fowl on the opposite bank.
“Have you read Ibsen?” queried Stuart with disconcerting acuteness—considering that he had seen her for three days past with the “Doll’s House” in her hand.
Aureole murmured: “She went out to find herself and to earn his respect....” No need of a superfluity of words when talking to this man; his grasp at her meanings was almost uncanny. And she thought with distaste of Oliver’s “I—don’t—quite—follow,” whenever she let fall a subtlety. Nor did it ever occur to her that Nigger Strachey, who had taken a first at Oxford, was perfectly capable of following her to any lengths that were worth his while, and merely made her explain her special type of profundity in the faint hope that thus she would attain to a sense of what it lacked.
Aureole’s soft lips were mysteriously smiling; but she merely said in light tones: “You are a bad counsellor, Mr. Heron. Why don’t you persuade me to obey my husband and be content with my lot?”
“Not much fun in that, is there?” he replied; and would have enlarged further on the stuntorian point of view which lay in breaking away from a husband because he refused to contradict you. But remembering Aureole lived three twists further down the corkscrew than himself, he substituted a reflective: “I wouldn’t mind being present at the scene when you came together again.”
Her eyes, large and velvety brown as pansies, began to sparkle. “So you anticipate a stormy reconciliation, do you?”
Stuart said with a graveness that rebuked her flippancy: “Do you love him so little as to remain always apart?”
She drooped her head; truth to say, she was exceedingly fond of her stolid square-backed husband. “If I returned to him——”
“You’d have achieved your purpose then. Nigger needs a volcanic eruption before he would realize anything, least of all you. But once the knowledge came to him, he’d need an earthquake to dislodge it again. His mind isn’t elastic, you see. It’s for you to provide the eruption. If you don’t——” Stuart paused to extract matches and cigarette from his pocket.