“I do not wish Ada disturbed. As you know, I am starting with her to Seaham to-morrow, and she needs the rest.”
“I was very quiet,” he said almost apologetically, and a little wearily.
Her critical eye had wandered to the book and pencil in his hand. The look was cold—glacially so—and disapproving, as she asked with quiet point:
“My lord, when do you intend to give up your tiresome habit of versifying?”
He stared at her. In all her lack of understanding, she had at least spared him this. Yet this was really what she thought! At heart she despised him for the only thing that to him made life endurable. She took no pride in his poetry, wished him a man like others of her circle—a dull, church-going, speech-reading, tea-drinking, partridge-hunting clod! A flush blurred his vision.
“Surely,” a thin edge of contempt cutting in her words, “you do not intend always to do only this? You are a peer, you have a seat in the Lords. You might be anything you choose.”
“But if I am—what I choose?” he said difficultly.
A chill anger lay behind her constrained manner. Her lips were pressed tight together. During the whole time of their marriage he had never seen her display more feeling than in that brief moment on the terrace at Newstead when he had put his mother’s ring upon her finger. For a long time he had watched for some sign—each day feeling his heart, so savage of vitality, contract and harden under that colorless restraint—till he had come to realize that the untroubled gentleness was only passivity, the calm strength but complacency as cold as the golden guinea he had treasured, that the flower he had chosen for its white fragrance was a sculptured altar-lily. Now her mind seemed jolted from its conventional groove. The fact was that the constant flings of his enemies, which he noted with sovereign contempt, had pierced her deeply, wounding that love of the world’s opinion so big in her. And a venomous review which her mother had brought her that day had mingled its abuse with a strain of pity for her, and pity she could not bear.
“Why do you not choose to live like other men?” she broke out. “There is something so selfish, so unnatural in your engrossed silences, your changeable moods, your disregard of ordinary customs. You believe nothing that other men believe.”
His face had grown weirdly white. The sudden outburst had startled him. He was struggling with resentment.