“Did you find out anything more in your retrospective gropings—at Nice?” he asked, with a touch of bitterness.
She was silent.
“Did you hear that I was out of my mind after my wife’s death?”
“Yes.”
“Did that shock you? Did it horrify you to know you had lived fourteen years with a ci-devant lunatic?”
“George, how can you say such things! I could perfectly understand how your mind was affected by that dreadful event—how the strongest brain might be unhinged by such a sorrow. I can sympathise with you, and understand you in the past as I can in the present. How can you forget that I am your wife, a part of yourself, able to read all your thoughts?”
“I cannot forget that you have been my wife; but your sympathy and your affection seem very far off now—as remote almost as that tragedy which darkened my youth. It is all past and done with—the sorrow and pain, the hope and gladness. I have done with everything—except my regret for my child.”
“Can you believe that I feel the parting less than you, George?” she asked piteously.
“I don’t know. The parting is your work. You have the satisfaction of self-sacrifice—the pride which women who go to church twice a day have in renouncing earthly happiness. They school themselves first in trifles—giving up this and that—theatres, fiction, cheerful society—and then their ambition widens. These petty sacrifices are not enough, and they renounce a husband and a home. If the husband cannot see the necessity, and cannot kiss the rod, so much the worse for him. His wife has the perverted pride of an Indian widow who flings her young life upon the funeral pile, jubilant at the thought of her own exalted virtue.”
“Would you not sacrifice your happiness to your conscience, George, if conscience spoke plainly?” Mildred asked reproachfully.