‘I want to ask a kindness of you,’ she said. ‘Will you promise to answer me quite frankly?’ I wondered what the deuce was coming, but I promised, seeing no way out of it. ‘I want you to tell me,’ she went on, ‘whether you see anything queer about me, about my behaviour? Do I say or do anything that seems to you odd?’
Her perturbation was so great that I smiled to hide my perception of it. I answered jocularly: ‘Nothing at all odd, my dear Monica, except this question of yours. What makes you ask it?’
But she was not to be shaken so easily out of her fears, whatever they were. ‘And do you find nothing strange about this household either?’
‘Nothing strange at all,’ I assured her. ‘Your marriage is an unhappy one, but so are thousands of others. Nothing strange about that.’
‘What about him?’ she said. And her eyes seemed to probe for an answer.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Are you asking for my opinion of your husband? A delicate thing to discuss.’
‘We’re speaking in confidence, aren’t we!’ She spoke impatiently, waving my politeness away.
‘Well, since you ask, I don’t like him. I don’t like his face: it’s a parody on mankind. And I can’t understand why you threw yourself away on him.’
She was eager to explain. ‘He wasn’t always like this. He was a gifted man, with brains and an imagination. He still is, for all I know. You spoke of his face—now how would you describe his face, in one word?’
I couldn’t help being tickled by the comedy of the situation: a man and a woman sitting in solemn conclave seeking a word by which to describe another man’s face, and that man her husband. But her air of tragedy, though I thought it ridiculous, sobered me. I pondered her question for a while, recalling to my mind’s eye the long narrow physiognomy and the large teeth of Dearth.