“So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said.
Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve,” he said.
“I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and grinned.
He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to mystify them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, to surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked with pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the hat-box and the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too good to be true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. They did not understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring spirit of his feat.
If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say “Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It was inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman’s dull acceptance of it as something not in the least extraordinary.
He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if he offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is idiotic to tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; especially when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion.
Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out of love is desperately easy.
“As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and bore responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. He did all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as in all else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to make adjustments.
The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to tide them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year when the adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can love a woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and he can fall out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s marriage was not made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with a marriage so made it is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. Little things count more than big when there is no passion to create its life-long mirage.
If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness.