Cynthia did not go up to her room at once. She sat down by the dying fire and wondered. She wondered—in the hour in which she had come mentally nearest to him—if, after all, Humphrey and she were united so closely as she had supposed.
[CHAPTER XII]
She loved him. When they married, perhaps neither had literally loved the other, but the girl had roused much stronger feelings in the man than the man had wakened in the girl. To-day the position was reversed; and her perception that he did not find her so companionable as she had dreamed was the beginning of a struggle to render herself a companion to him.
If she had been a woman of keener intuitions, she must have perceived it long ago, but her intuitions were not keen. She was not so dull as he thought her, nor was she so dull as when she married, but a woman of the most rapid intelligence she would never be. Her heart was greater than her mind—much greater; her heart entitled her to a devotion that she was far from receiving. To her mind marriage had made a trifling difference; her sensibilities it had developed enormously. Her husband overlooked her sensibilities, and chafed at her mind. Fortunately for her peace, her tardy perception of their relations did not embrace quite so much as that.
She stayed at Bournemouth for a fortnight, and when she came home her efforts to acquire the quickness that she lacked, to talk in the same strain as Kent, to utter the kind of extravagance which seemed to be his idea of wit, were laboured and pathetic. Especially as he did not notice them. She read the books that he admired, and was bored by them more frequently than she was moved. She attempted, in fact, to mould herself upon him, and she attempted it with such scanty encouragement, and with so little apparent result, that, if her imitation had not become instinctive by degrees, she would have been destined to renounce it in despair.
He was not at this time the most agreeable of models; he was too much humiliated and too anxious. Though Mr. and Mrs. Walford were superficially affable again, he felt a difference that he could not define in their manner, and was always uncomfortable in their presence. He had called the book The Eye of the Beholder, and he submitted it to Messrs. Percival and King. But February waned without any communication coming from the firm, and once more the Walfords asked him almost every day if he had "any news." His only prop now was Turquand, whom he often went to town to see. Turquand had been genuinely dismayed, by Messrs. Cousins' refusal, and it was by his advice that the author had chosen Percival and King. Kent awaited their verdict feverishly. Not only was his humiliation bad to bear, but his financial position was beginning to be serious, and the Walfords' knowledge of the fact aggravated the unpleasantness of it.
Messrs. Percival sent the manuscript back at the end of April. They did not offer any criticism upon the work; they regretted merely that in the present state of the book market they could not undertake the publication of The Eye of the Beholder.
Then the novelist packed it up again, and posted it to Fendall and Green. Messrs. Fendall and Green were longer in replying, and the fact of the second rejection could not be withheld from the Walfords. After they had heard of it, the change in their manner towards him was more marked. They obviously regarded him as a poor pretender in literature, and her mother admitted as much to Cynthia once.
"Well, mamma," said Cynthia valiantly, "I don't see how you can speak like that! It's terribly unfortunate, and he's very worried, but you know what Humphrey's reviews have been—nothing can take away the success he has had."