CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE REVOLT OF A SLAVE
The day after that on which Berselius had seen Leopold, Madame Berselius, moved by one of those fits of caprice common to women of her type, came back suddenly from Trouville.
She knew of her husband’s return, but she knew nothing of the injury or of the alteration that had come in him until Maxine, who met her at the station, hinted at the fact. Berselius was standing at the window of his private sitting room when Madame Berselius was announced.
He turned to greet her; even as he turned she perceived the change. This was not the man who had left her a few months ago, strong, confident, impassive; the man who had been her master and before whom she had shrunk like a slave. Intuition told her that the change was not the change wrought by sickness—Berselius was not ill, he was gone, leaving another man in his place. They conversed for some time on indifferent matters, and then Madame Berselius took her departure for her own apartments.
But she left the room of Berselius a changed woman, just as he had returned to it a changed man.
The slave in her had found her freedom. Utterly without the capacity for love and without honour, without conscience and with a vague superstition to serve for religion, Madame Berselius had, up to this, been held in her place by the fear of her husband. His will up to this had been her law; she had moved in the major affairs of life under his direction, and even in the minor affairs of life everything had to be surrendered at his word.
And now she hated him.