“It wasn’t a straight proposition, because all the perticlers wasn’t put in. I didn’t know I was buying a woman——”
She flared up in an instant.
“How dare you——!”
“Wal, put it how you wish, it comes to the same thing in the end. I fell to it all right, and I ain’t squealing. If I was the sort o’ man you, no doubt, take me for, I might want value for money, and I’m big enough to get it.... No need to get scared. Though you love me like you might a rattlesnake, I happen to love you. You might as well know it.”
His calmness amazed her. She had half expected a furious onslaught. On one point she wanted to put him right.
“You think I despise you, but that’s not true,” she said. “I couldn’t have married you had I despised you. But I can’t love you—I can’t. Can’t you see that our ways lie far apart? All 91 your life, your very mode of thought and speech, are the direct antithesis of mine. Isn’t it plain—wasn’t it plain at first that it was a mere bargain? You and I can be nothing to each other but—friends.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he growled. “If you’d have told me that, I’d have seen you to hell before I married you, or even kissed you. Blood is blood, and nature’s nature, and passion’s passion, and gew-gaws don’t count—no, nor polite chin-music either. You were my woman, and I wanted you before all the other wimmen on God’s earth. It’s the little things that don’t matter that fills your mind. If men were all tea-slopping, thin-spined, haw-hawing creatures like some I seen here, with never a darned notion of how to dig for their daily bread, though they talked like angels and acted like cardboard saints, this world ’ud be a darned poor show.... Anyway, you’ve got to learn that.... We’re going back to-morrow, and I guess we’d better finish this play-acting. Devonshire’s good enough for me if you’ll take the London house.”
She nodded. That had been her own innermost desire. She was glad he made the suggestion 92 himself. Before coming away he had leased a house in Maida Vale, and had given instructions to Liberty’s to furnish it. It would be pleasanter there, in the midst of friends, than planted away in the wilds of Devonshire with a “cowpuncher.”
The months that followed were purgatory to Jim. Once or twice he ran up to the club, where he heard things that were not conducive to a happy state of mind. Angela was entertaining on a lavish scale. Cholmondeley told him of the extraordinary “success” of his wife’s parties. According to Cholmondeley every other hostess was completely outshone by the beautiful Angela, whose photograph was now an almost permanent feature in the daily press.