“It isn’t that,” said Lady Harman; “it’s the feeling——”
“The feeling of being able to—defy—anything I say,” said Sir Isaac with a note of bitterness. “As if I didn’t understand!”
It was beyond Lady Harman’s powers to express just how that wasn’t the precise statement of the case.
Sir Isaac, reverting to his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness, expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have two different sets of friends;—let alone every other consideration, he explained, it wasn’t convenient for them not to be about together, and as for reading or thinking what she chose he had never made any objection to anything unless it was “decadent rot” that any decent man would object to his womanfolk seeing, rot she couldn’t understand the drift of—fortunately. Blear-eyed humbug.... He checked himself on the verge of an almost archiepiscopal outbreak in order to be patiently reasonable again. He was prepared to concede that it would be very nice if Lady Harman could be a good wife and also an entirely independent person, very nice, but the point was—his tone verged on the ironical—that she couldn’t be two entirely different people at the same time.
“But you have your friends,” she said, “you go away alone——”
“That’s different,” said Sir Isaac with a momentary note of annoyance. “It’s business. It isn’t that I want to.”
Lady Harman had a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again, taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at present wasn’t full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the world, he had politics and—“all sorts of things”; she hadn’t these interests; she had nothing in the place of them——
Sir Isaac closed this opening rather abruptly by telling her that she should count herself lucky she hadn’t, and again the conversation was suspended for a time.
“But I want to know about these things,” she said.
Sir Isaac took that musingly.