‘Right you are.—Have a drink first? Nice quiet place round in Fleet Street—glass of wine. No? As you please, old chum.—Think this shop ‘ll do, don’t you? You must come round when it’s finished. But I daresay you’ll be here many a time—on biz.’
‘Oh, I daresay.’
And as they went down the stairs, Crewe laughed again at his recollections of yesterday’s sport.
CHAPTER 6
Gusts of an October evening swept about the square of the old Inn, and made rushes at the windows; all the more cosy seemed it here in Tarrant’s room, where a big fire, fed into smokeless placidity, purred and crackled. Pipe in mouth, Tarrant lay back in his big chair, gracefully indolent as ever. Opposite him, lamp-light illuminating her face on one side, and fire-gloom on the other, Nancy turned over an illustrated volume, her husband’s gift today. Many were the presents he had bestowed upon her, costly some of them, all flattering the recipient by a presumption of taste and intelligence.
She had been here since early in the afternoon, it was now near seven o’clock.
Nancy looked at the pictures, but inattentively, her brows slightly knitted, and her lips often on the point of speech that concerned some other matter. Since the summer holiday she had grown a trifle thinner in face; her beauty was no longer allied with perfect health; a heaviness appeared on her eyelids. Of course she wore the garb of mourning, and its effect was to emphasise the maturing change manifest in her features.
For several minutes there had passed no word; but Tarrant’s face, no less than his companion’s, signalled discussion in suspense. No unfriendly discussion, yet one that excited emotional activity in both of them. The young man, his pipe-hand falling to his knee, first broke silence.
‘I look at it in this way. We ought to regard ourselves as married people living under exceptionally favourable circumstances. One has to bear in mind the brutal fact that man and wife, as a rule, see a great deal too much of each other—thence most of the ills of married life: squabblings, discontents, small or great disgusts, leading often enough to altri guai. People get to think themselves victims of incompatibility, when they are merely suffering from a foolish custom—the habit of being perpetually together. In fact, it’s an immoral custom. What does immorality mean but anything that tends to kill love, to harden hearts? The common practice of man and wife occupying the same room is monstrous, gross; it’s astounding that women of any sensitiveness endure it. In fact, their sensitiveness is destroyed. Even an ordinary honeymoon generally ends in quarrel—as it certainly ought to. You and I escape all that. Each of us lives a separate life, with the result that we like each other better as time goes on; I speak for myself, at all events. I look forward to our meetings. I open the door to you with as fresh a feeling of pleasure as when you came first. If we had been ceaselessly together day and night—well, you know the result as well as I do.’