It was the most sentimental speech that Peter had ever heard from human lips, and he stared incredulously. But incredulity faded. Her tone of voice worked on him even after she fell silent. He still felt its vibration in the air while the mask shifted subtly before his eyes. Somehow, as she sat there, breathing such simple passion from her intricate adornments, she became at once more astounding and more intelligible. One saw it all—even Peter, in his young and untutored heart, knew infallibly. She had loved her husband supremely, and she had chucked everything for him. She had chucked so much, in fact, that she had even lost all sense of the worth of what she had cast away. She had nothing left to measure it by. Peter felt that America itself was a good deal to have chucked. It soothed his pride a little, to be sure, to have her treat New York so cavalierly. She hadn’t so much as looked at it; and she had circumnavigated the globe for him. It was clear, too, that every moment of the journey was a kind of torture to her. Her very look round the room divulged an agony of strangeness and suspense. She was just longing to be back on her island. Peter thrilled a little foolishly to it. He fancied it was a grande passion. The only grande passion Peter had hitherto known had been that of a sophomore friend for his landlady’s daughter. That, though it had been enhanced by proper detail of elopement, disinheritance, and threats of suicide, had disappointed them all in the end. The bride was rather silly and tried to borrow money; and when Peter and Marty, in their senior year, had re-read Lawrence’s sonnet-sequence, they had found that it didn’t scan. But this—this was different. Whatever his mother had undertaken, she had obviously put it through. After all those years of marriage, to have your voice vibrate like that! It had never occurred to Peter that a fellow’s mother could still be in love with his father. Even in novels mothers weren’t. As for life: he recalled the parents that he knew. He had never seen another woman with just that look, the look of a dedicated being, of some one whose bloom had been, first and last, both jealously hoarded and lavishly spent. She was like a woman out of a harem: a million graces for one man, but a mere veiled bundle to all the rest. That was the secret of her uniqueness. She was a charming woman to whom the notion of charming the world at large would be blasphemous. Her mood had been slowly orientalized to match her exterior, which had gradually grown exotic. She would die in suttee. Peter felt her quality no less poignantly because his words for it were unsure. Of course she didn’t want to stay in America! Of course she was off to Vancouver at midnight! And yet—why, why had she come? Would she never explain?
She had been looking out of the window while he soliloquized—it was part of the whole sub-tropical spectacle of her that she should limit herself to so few hours, and then be as languid as if she had leased a suite at the St. Justin for life. She turned just as Peter had made up his mind to speak.
“There was one summer when you wanted to go to the Caucasus, I remember—a rather queer trip that was going to cost a great deal. We were sorry—I was dreadfully sorry—that you couldn’t go.”
Peter frowned. There you were! She crammed the supreme interview of a lifetime into an hour, and then had the audacity to be irrelevant.
“We couldn’t afford it just then. It—it was a very expensive year. I had to tell Spencer we couldn’t. I hope you didn’t hate us for it.”
Peter laughed. “I didn’t even know you had anything to do with it. Old Martin didn’t tell me it was funds. He just wet-blanketed the whole thing—said it wasn’t safe and he couldn’t hear of it. I didn’t mind much. I went to Murray Bay to visit another chap. But, I say—do you mean old Martin asked you?”
“He cabled.”
“And you?”
“I cabled back.”
“Has he been consulting you about me all these years? In cases like that, when I didn’t dream of it?”