“No,” she answered gloomily. “Nothing you can say will prevent my being miserable. That woman has come into my life and spoilt it.”
“Only because you are unreasonably and absurdly jealous. You are miserable of your own choice. You have me here, your faithful husband, unchanged in thought, act, or feeling since the day we rowed down the river; and yet you choose to torture yourself with vile suspicions, unworthy of a lady, unworthy of a wife.”
“I cannot help it,” she said. “We all have some latent sin, I suppose. Perhaps jealousy is mine. I never knew what it was to feel wicked before. Forgive me, Jack, if you can.”
She took up his hand, kissed it, and then sank sighing into her chair, the chair she had christened Joan, while his, the colossal armchair, was Darby.
“I forgive you with all my heart, Eve, on condition that this little storm is the last outbreak. I should be sorry to think our married life was to be a succession of tempests in teacups.”
“I promise to behave better in future. I hate myself for my folly.”
Vansittart resumed his newspaper, too much disturbed to court conversation. He felt himself living upon the crust of a volcano. This ceaseless jealousy was a matter of trivial moment in itself. He could have laughed it off, as too absurd for serious argument; but this jealousy brought Eve to the brink of that revelation which might wreck two lives. The horror in front of him was a horror that meant doom.
Eve bore with the silence for a few minutes, took off her bonnet, and carefully adjusted the petals of an artificial rose, studied the little fantasy of lace and flowers as if it were the gravest thing in the world, then flung it impatiently on a chair, and began to smooth out her long suède gloves on her soft, silken knee. Her nerves were strung to torture. She had pretended to be satisfied, while the tempest in her heart was still raging. She looked at her husband as if she hated him. Yes; it was hateful to see him sitting there, silent, imperturbable, reading his newspaper, while she was in the depths of despair. The fact that he had refused to show her that letter seemed almost an admission of guilt. If the thing which he had told her was true, the letter would have borne witness to his truth. He would have been eager to show it to her. “Here,” he would have said, “under the woman’s own hand, you will see that she is nothing to me.”
She brooded thus for about ten minutes, and then her irritation could submit to silence no longer.
“What was the City doing?” she asked. “The City which deprived me of your company at Mrs. Montford’s luncheon.”