“Some women would seem to,” answered his wife.
Involuntarily she glanced to where Mrs. Camelford sat with elbows resting on the table; and involuntarily also the small twinkling eyes of her husband followed in the same direction. There is a type that reaches its prime in middle age. Mrs. Camelford, nee Jessica Dearwood, at twenty had been an uncanny-looking creature, the only thing about her appealing to general masculine taste having been her magnificent eyes, and even these had frightened more than they had allured. At forty, Mrs. Camelford might have posed for the entire Juno.
“Yes, he's a cunning old joker is Time,” murmured Mr. Everett, almost inaudibly.
“What ought to have happened,” said Mrs. Armitage, while with deft fingers rolling herself a cigarette, “was for you and Nellie to have married.”
Mrs. Everett's pale face flushed scarlet.
“My dear,” exclaimed the shocked Nathaniel Armitage, flushing likewise.
“Oh, why may one not sometimes speak the truth?” answered his wife petulantly. “You and I are utterly unsuited to one another—everybody sees it. At nineteen it seemed to me beautiful, holy, the idea of being a clergyman's wife, fighting by his side against evil. Besides, you have changed since then. You were human, my dear Nat, in those days, and the best dancer I had ever met. It was your dancing was your chief attraction for me as likely as not, if I had only known myself. At nineteen how can one know oneself?”
“We loved each other,” the Rev. Armitage reminded her.
“I know we did, passionately—then; but we don't now.” She laughed a little bitterly. “Poor Nat! I am only another trial added to your long list. Your beliefs, your ideals are meaningless to me—mere narrow-minded dogmas, stifling thought. Nellie was the wife Nature had intended for you, so soon as she had lost her beauty and with it all her worldly ideas. Fate was maturing her for you, if only we had known. As for me, I ought to have been the wife of an artist, of a poet.” Unconsciously a glance from her ever restless eyes flashed across the table to where Horatio Camelford sat, puffing clouds of smoke into the air from a huge black meerschaum pipe. “Bohemia is my country. Its poverty, its struggle would have been a joy to me. Breathing its free air, life would have been worth living.”
Horatio Camelford leant back with eyes fixed on the oaken ceiling. “It is a mistake,” said Horatio Camelford, “for the artist ever to marry.”