“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re wrong.”
He put his hand on hers. “Am I, Mary? Absolutely?”
“No,” she confessed, “and I’m grateful. You’ve done many things for me and this is the biggest of them all. If I stay on the stage, I’ll play it and I’ll... I’ll not make a failure. But you haven’t tempted me to stay. I’m getting mixed. I mean I’m tempted, horribly. I’ve a megaphone in my brain that’s shouting at me to damn everything and just jolly well show them what I can do with that part. But I won’t damn everything. I won’t forget the things that make it doubtful whether I’ll stay on the stage or not. I’ll give up Sans-Gêne rather than forget them, and I know as well as you do what Rossiter means by casting me for that part. He means that Mary’s right there.”
“Yes,” said Chown, “he means that.”
“It’s decent of him. We’ll be decent, too, please. We’ll tell him there’s a doubt.”
“Look here, Mary, I know you well enough to ask. Is it a baby?”
She shook her head. “Not that sort of baby,” she said, and puzzled him.
It was Rupert. In Mary’s opinion, Rupert was in danger of becoming the husband of Mary Arden, one of those deplorable hangers-on of the theater who assert a busy self-importance because they are married to somebody who is famous. He hadn’t, quite, come to that yet, but it was difficult to see what else he could assert of himself beyond his emphatic negative against going to Staithley; and she proposed very definitely that he should not come to it, either. He should not, even if she had to leave the stage, even if she must sacrifice so great, so climactic a part as Sans-Gêne.
She had not come painlessly to that opinion of him. She had not watched him since his demobilization and she had not come to her profound conviction that something was very wrong with Rupert, without feeling shame at her scrutiny and distrust of this love of hers which could disparage. At first, while he was still at the Front, she went on acting simply to drug anxiety. She acted on the stage by night and for the films by day, and later it was to see if she could not, by setting an example, persuade him that work was a sound diet; and now she was afraid that the example had miscarried and that her associations with the stage were doing him a mischief. To work in the Galaxy was one thing, to loaf in it another, and he, who had no work to do there, was in it a good deal.
If Rupert was developing anything, it was listlessness. He had an animal content in Mary, and was allowing a honeymoon to become a routine. Perhaps because she was a certainty and because the war had sated him with hazards, he could not bear to be away from her. She had suggested Cambridge and, though it was flat, was ready to go there with him. He went and looked at Cambridge, found it overcrowded and returned to London. Through the summer he played some cricket, in minor M. C. C. matches, and did not find his form. He thought of golf for the winter, found that the good clubs had long waiting lists, and, though friends offered to rush him in, refused to have strings pulled for him.