She smiled at him as she shook her head. "I've spent too many months trying to get it and seeing myself fail—oh, so ridiculously!—not to know what I am talking about, Roddy."
And then, still smiling, rather sadly, she told what some of the experiments had been—some of her attempts to break into the life he kept locked away from her and carry off a share of it for herself.
"I was angry at first when I found you keeping me out," she said, "angry and hurt. I used to cry about it. And then I saw it wasn't your fault. That's how I discovered friendship had to be earned."
But her power to maintain that attitude of grave detachment was about spent. The passion mounted in her voice and in her eyes as she went on.
"You thought it was because of my condition, as you called it, that my mind had got full of wild ideas;—the wild idea that I wasn't really and truly your wife at all, but only your mistress, and that I was pulling you down from something free and fine that you had been, to something that you despised yourself for being and had to try to deny you were. Those were the obsessions of a pregnant woman, you thought—something she was to be soothed and coddled into forgetting. You were wrong about that, Roddy.
"I did have an obsession, but it wasn't the thing you thought. It was an obsession that kept me quiet, and contented and happy, and willing to wait in spite of everything. The obsession was that none of those things mattered because a big miracle was coming that was going to change it all. I was going to have a job at last—a job that was just as real as yours—the job of being a mother."
Her voice broke in a fierce sharp little laugh over the word, but she got it back in control again.
"I was going to have a baby to feed out of my own body, to keep alive with my own care. There was going to be responsibility and hard work, things that demanded courage and endurance and sacrifice. I could earn your friendship with that, I said. That was the real obsession, Roddy, and it never really died until to-night. Because of course I have kept on hoping, even after I might have seen how it was. But the babies' lives aren't to be jeopardized to gratify my whims. Well, I suppose I can't complain. It's over, that's the main thing.
"And now, here I am perfectly normal and well again—as good as ever. I've kept my looks—oh, my hair and my complexion and my figure. I could wear pretty clothes again and start going out to things now that the season's begun, just as I did a year ago. People would admire me, and you'd be pleased, and you'd love me as much as ever, and it would all be like the paradise it was last year, except for one thing. The one thing is that if I do that, I'll know this time what I really am. Your mistress, Roddy; your legal, perfectly respectable mistress,—and a little more despicable rather than less, I think, because of the adjectives."
"I've let that word go by once," he said quietly, but with a dangerous light of anger in his eyes. "I won't again. It's perfectly outrageous and inexcusable that you should talk like that, and I'll ask you never to do it again."