She accepted with meek docility Blaise’s decision regarding the purely formal relations upon which their married life was henceforth to be based, apparently humbly thankful to be reinstated as his wife on any terms whatsoever that he chose to dictate..
“I know I have been bad—bad,” she declared, “to run away and leave you like that. I can’t”—forlornly—“hope for you to love me again——”
And Tormarin had replied with unmistakable decision:
“No, you can’t hope for that. And I’m glad you understand and recognise the fact. Still, we can try to be good friends, Nesta, at least.”
But this tranquil state of things only lasted for a comparatively short time. Very soon, as the novelty and satisfaction of her reinstatement began to wear off, Nesta became more self-assured and, apparently, considerably less frequently visited by spasms of repentance and remorse.
Her butterfly nature could retain no very deep impression for any length of time, and gradually the characteristics of the old Nesta—the pettish, self-willed, pleasure-loving woman of former times—began to reassert themselves.
Blaise tried hard to exercise forbearance with her and to treat her, at least with justice and with a certain meed of kindliness. But she did not second his efforts. Instead, she became more exigeant and difficult as time passed on.
She was no longer satisfied by the fact that she was once more installed as the mistress of Staple. She demanded a husband who would surround her with all the little observances that only love itself can dictate, whom she could alternately scold and cajole as the fancy took her, but who would always come back to her, after a tiff, ready anew to play the adoring lover.
She found Blaise’s cool, measured, elder-brotherly kindness unendurable, and she exhausted herself beating continually against the rock of his determination, without producing any effect other than to make his manner even more austere, less friendly than it had been before.
Then when she recognised her total inability to move him to any sort of responsive emotion, and that her beauty—which was undeniable—made no more impression upon him than if he had been blind, she resorted to the old, painfully, familiar weapons of tears and fits of temper, in the course of which she would upbraid him bitterly, pouring forth streams of reproaches which more often than not culminated in an attack of hysterics.