And now Susan Amphlett told people that Vera was killing herself, and that her husband, though as passionately in love with her as ever he had been, was selfish and thoughtless, and was spending her money, and ruining her health, with the extravagances and agitations of a racing stable that was on a scale he ought never to have allowed himself.
"After all, it is her money," said Susan, "and it's bad form on his part to be so reckless."
"But as she has only a life interest in Provana's millions, and as her trustees are some of the sharpest business men in London, Rutherford can't do her much harm," said masculine common-sense, while feminine malice was lifting its shoulders and eyebrows with doleful prognostics.
"Well, I suppose the money is all right," said Chorus, still inclined to be tragic; "it's her health I'm afraid of. She's losing her high spirits, her joy in everything, and she is getting out of touch with her husband. She could hardly give him a smile when Blue Rose won the Oaks. She sat in a corner of her box, looking the other way, while that lovely animal was coming down the hill neck and neck with the favourite, at a moment when any other woman would have been simply frantic."
"She is not of the stuff that racing men's wives are made of," said Eustace Lyon, the poet. "No doubt she was worlds away—in dreamland—and did not even know whose mare the bookies and the mob were cheering."
"She was not like that two years ago," said Chorus. "She and Claude were in such perfect sympathy that it was impossible for either of them to have a joy that the other did not share. It was a case of two souls with but a single thought."
"I can quite believe that, for I never gave C. R. credit for thinking," replied the poet.
Satiety had come. It came in a day. The fatal day that comes to all the favoured and the fortunate, and which never comes to the poor and the unlucky. That evil at least is spared to Nature's stepchildren. They never have too much of anything, except debt and difficulty. They never yawn in each other's faces, and ask themselves where they can go for the summer. They never turn over the leaves of a Continental Bradshaw and complain that they are tired of everywhere.
It is the people who can go everywhere and have everything who find the wide earth a garden run to seed, and feel the dust of the desert in their mouths as they talk of the pleasure places that the herd long for. This time had come for Vera, at the end of her third season as Claude Rutherford's wife. He, the gay and the insouciant, was careless still, but it was a new kind of carelessness: the carelessness that comes from hating everything that an exhausted life can give.