"Yes, my dearest."
"To return to Laura—what should have been her fate had the gods been kind?"
She left his question without an answer so dangerously long as to create a strange feeling of excitement and strain between them. Then, reluctantly, she answered it. "Laura might have been happiest in not marrying at all, and in any case she should have married late. As to what kind of man would have made her happy, of course I have a theory."
"What is your theory?" He leant towards her, breathing rather quickly.
"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that Laura might have been happy with a man of the world, older than herself, who would have regarded his wife as a rare and beautiful possession. Such a man would have understood the measure of what she was willing and able to give—and to withhold. I can also imagine Laura married to a young idealist, the kind of man whose attitude to his wife is one of worship, whose demands, if indeed they can be called demands, are few, infrequent——"
Mrs. Tropenell stopped abruptly. What she had just said led to a path she did not mean to follow. But she soon realised with dismay that she had said too much, or too little.
"Do you mean," said Oliver hoarsely, "that Pavely—that Pavely——" he left his question unfinished, but she knew he meant to exact an answer and she did not keep him waiting long for it. Still she chose her words very carefully.
"I think that Godfrey Pavely, in the matter of his relations to his wife, is a very unfortunate, and, some would say, a very ill-used man, Oliver."
Oliver Tropenell suddenly diminished the distance between his mother and himself. The carefully chosen, vague words she had just uttered had been like balm poured into a festering and intolerably painful wound.
"Poor devil!" he said contemptuously, and there was a rather terrible tone of triumph, as well as of contempt, in the muttered exclamation.