She said, frightenedly: "Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, what's the matter—why are you talking to me like this?"
"I hope I'm not being unfair," he replied, imperturbably.
She flung herself on the bed and began to sob.
He went on unfastening his dress tie and thinking: She married me because my father has money. She married me because her father told her to. She schemed to get me. The housemastership was a plant to get me married to her before I knew whether I really wanted her or not.
He was carefully silent the whole rest of the night, though it was hard to lie awake and hear her sobbing.
IV
The next evening, Christmas Day, there was another party. She looked rather pale and unhappy, but he saw she was trying to be lively. He felt acutely sorry for her, and yet, whenever he felt in the mood to relent, he fortified his mind by thinking of her duplicity. He thought of other things besides her duplicity. He thought of her stupidity. Why was she so stupid? Why had he married a woman who couldn't gossip at a small Christmas party without being nervous? Why had he married a woman who never spoke at table unless she were spoken to? Other women said the silliest things and they sounded ordinary; Helen, forcing herself in sheer desperation to do so, occasionally said the most ordinary things and they sounded silly. If she ventured on any deliberate remark the atmosphere was always as if the whole world had stopped moving in order to see her make a fool of herself; what she said was probably no more foolish than what anybody else might have said, yet somehow it seemed outlined against the rest of the conversation as a piece of stark, unmitigated lunacy. Speed found himself holding his breath when she began to speak.
After the rest of the party had gone away he went: into the library for a cigarette. Helen had gone up to bed; it was past two o'clock, but he felt very wakeful and disturbed. The morning-room adjoined the library, and as he sat smoking by the remains of the fire, he heard conversation. He heard his father's gruff voice saying: "God knows, Fanny, I don't."
A remark apposite to a great many subjects, he reflected, with a half-smile. He had no intention to eavesdrop, but he did not see why he should move away merely because they were talking so loudly about some probably unimportant topic that their voices carried into the next room.
Then he heard his mother say: "I think she means well, Charles. Probably she's not used to the kind of life here."