Then she began to reason: Why break it off? He is the most agreeable man I have ever known; why lose him? If I dismiss him thus cavalierly, he will be piqued at least, and I shall not even have his friendship. And I can never love or have a throb of real feeling. All that was the delusion of a morbid imagination. There are no men like those I have dreamed of. The ocean rolls between the actual and the ideal.
She did Cryder some injustice in the earlier part of her meditations. He was really very fond of her. There were many things about her that he liked immensely. She was beautiful, she was artistic, she had a fine mind, and, above all things, she was the fashion, and he had carried her off. But he never rushed at a woman and kissed her the moment he entered the room; he did not think it good taste. Moreover, she looked particularly handsome in that black-velvet gown and stiff white ruff, and her position in that carved, high-backed chair was superb. His eye was too well pleased to allow the interference of his other senses. After a time he went over and lifted her face and kissed her. She shrugged her shoulders a little but made no resistance.
CHAPTER XIX.
TASTELESS FRUIT.
She began to have an absurdly married feeling. When she had made up her mind to drift on the wave she had chosen, she had consoled herself with the thought that, if love was a disappointment, the situation was romantic. By constantly reminding herself that she was the heroine of “an experience,” she could realize in part her old wild dreams. To create objective illusion was a task she soon renounced. No matrimonial conditions were ever more prosaic and matter-of-fact than the various phases of this affair.
The evenings were long and very pleasant. Cryder smoked innumerable cigarettes in the most comfortable chair in the library, and was never dull. Hermia began to get rather fond of him in a motherly sort of way. One night he had a cold and she gave him a dose of quinine; occasionally she sent him certain of her cook’s dainty concoctions. She always had a little supper for him on his particular evenings, and took care that his favorite dishes were prepared.
She had her intervals of disgust and fury with fate, but they were becoming less frequent. Like all tragic and unversed women she was an extremist. She had dreamed that life was one thing; her particular episode had taught her that it was another. There was no medium nor opposite pole; she had been wrong in every theory.
Ennui was her worst enemy. Sometimes she got tired of the very sound of Cryder’s voice—it ceased so seldom. She longed for variety of any sort, for something to assure her that she was not as flatly married as Bessie and her husband. One day when she was more bored than usual Helen Simms came in.
“How brilliant you look!” she exclaimed. “What is the matter with you?”