“Think of it!” she cried to Lily. “I descended even to that ... even to spying. Oh, he is a monster. You have no idea the sort of a man he is.”
And yet (thought Lily) she loves him, or she would not feel so violently. And Lily did have an idea what sort of a man he was; she knew far more than Ellen imagined, for she was a woman of great experience, however discreet she may have been. That was perhaps the reason why every one bore their confidences to Lily first of all.
“And yet,” continued Ellen as they sat late one night in the long drawing-room, “there are times when for a moment I can see how perfect a husband, how perfect a lover he could be, if he but chose to be. Once we could have been happy, for I was the stronger then and I know that I could have changed him. He is in love with me in a queer fashion. He has behaved like this with no other woman.... I am certain of it.... I could have changed him once, but it is too late now.” And she, Ellen Tolliver, began to weep. “I am crying,” she said, “because I have missed so much. I know that I shall never have another chance at happiness ... of that sort.”
She is crying (thought Lily) because she is a child who wants everything in the world, a child who will never be satisfied.
“None of us,” she said aloud, “has everything. No one life is long enough to encompass it all. We can only try to have as much as possible.”
She might have added, “You have fame and wealth. Is not that enough?” But she kept silent because she knew that Ellen had taken account of these things and would, just then, have given them all in exchange for this other happiness. For Ellen could not bear the thought of having failed.
Lily was busy too in those days with her own affairs, for in the collapse of de Cyon’s party she found it necessary to entertain, to go about, to meet new people, to make new friends. She gave dinner after dinner and invited Americans who might be of importance to her husband; and because she was a woman whose life existed only in relation to the men who surrounded her, she did it all gladly, though it ran against all the indolence of her nature. It would help de Cyon and it would be good too for Jean. Lily, who no longer put up bulwarks against age—Lily, who had allowed the gray to come into her tawny hair, was stepping aside to make way for others.
In her tactful fashion she managed somehow to coördinate all the coming and going in the big house. When Ellen told her about the baby, she insisted that it be born in her house.
“It is the center of the family now and it has been my home for so long that I seem always to have lived here. It will be no trouble to any one. We will move de Cyon’s books out of the pavilion and turn it over to you. Jean used it for his own when he came home from school. De Cyon will not mind. He can have a room on the second floor.”
Indeed the news of the child altered the life of the entire household until the preparations took on the proportions of a royal arrival. Callendar sent flowers daily (which Ellen could not be forever sending away) and she accepted them because the child was his too. This thought saddened her and made her gentle with him when he came sometimes to call, respectfully, with a new tenderness of manner which she had never suspected. It might have weakened her will in the end and defeated her if she had not understood, as Sabine had done before her, that it was born in reality of his own vanity. He was being gentle with her now because she was the potential mother of his child, of his heir. At other times it maddened her to think that he should treat her gently and tenderly because there was the child to be considered. He had never thought of her at all. There had never been any real tenderness. She had suspicions too that it was only another way of attacking her will.