He nodded gravely. “It would have to be a special kind of man,” he agreed. “An ordinary individual would be crushed by your personality. You'd need a firm hand.”
Her face was inscrutable. “I have always had the misfortune to be too late,” she told him.
“I wish I had known you sooner!” he exclaimed.
Her arms, in transparent sleeves, were like marble. His words crystallized an overwhelming realization of how exactly she was suited to him. The desire to shut her will in his hand increased a thousandfold.
“Yes,” she said, “I would have married you. But there's no good discussing it.” She breathed deeply with a sinking forward of her rounded shoulders. All her vigor seemed to have left her. “I have been worried about Mrs. Turnbull lately,” she went on. “Perhaps it's my imagination—does she look weaker to you?”
“I haven't noticed,” he answered brusquely.
Curiously he had never thought of Emmy as dying; she appeared eternal, without the possibility of offering him the relief of such freedom as yet remained. Freedom for—for Meta Beggs.
“The doctor was at the cottage again Thursday,” she informed him. “I didn't hear what he said.”
“Humbugs,” August Turnbull pronounced.
A sudden caution invaded him. It would be well not to implicate himself too far with his wife's companion. She was a far shrewder woman than was common; there was such a thing as blackmail. He studied her privately. Damn it, what a pen he had been caught in! Her manner, too, changed immediately, as though she had read his feeling.