“No, I prefer a cold baked apple. I don’t feel the need of bacon every morning.”
Now, did she mean that there was no need for him to have bacon every morning, either, and that she grudged having to cook it for him?
“If you don’t want to cook the breakfast,” said he, “why don’t you keep a servant? You know we can afford one, and you know how I loathe to see my wife doing the work. Simply because all the women we have had in the past have been failures and utterly upset my regime, and made it almost impossible for me to have any pupils here, you’ve given up trying to find a decent woman. It’s not impossible to train a servant—is it? I mean, it doesn’t require genius?”
“But I prefer to do the work myself; it makes life so much more peaceful. . . . Run along, Adrian darling, and get ready for school.”
“Oh no, that’s not it!” Reginald pretended to smile. “You do the work yourself, because, for some extraordinary reason, you love to humiliate me. Objectively, you may not know that, but, subjectively, it’s the case.” This last remark so delighted him that he cut open an envelope as gracefully as if he had been on the stage. . . .
“DEAR MR. PEACOCK,
I feel I cannot go to sleep until I have thanked you again for the wonderful joy your singing gave me this evening. Quite unforgettable. You make me wonder, as I have not wondered since I was a girl, if this is all. I mean, if this ordinary world is all. If there is not, perhaps, for those of us who understand, divine beauty and richness awaiting us if we only have the courage to see it. And to make it ours. . . . The house is so quiet. I wish you were here now that I might thank you in person. You are doing a great thing. You are teaching the world to escape from life!
Yours, most sincerely,
ÆNONE FELL.
P.S.—I am in every afternoon this week. . . .”
The letter was scrawled in violet ink on thick, handmade paper. Vanity, that bright bird, lifted its wings again, lifted them until he felt his breast would break.
“Oh well, don’t let us quarrel,” said he, and actually flung out a hand to his wife.