“Keep still, Geoffrey! You’ll be all right in a few minutes. Don’t worry yourself.”
“Worry myself!” I echoed bitterly—“Why not say don’t kill yourself!”
“Because I see no necessity to offer you that advice at present—” he responded coolly—“and if there were necessity, I doubt if I should give it,—because I consider it better to kill one’s self than worry one’s self. However opinions differ. I want you to take this matter lightly.”
“Lightly!—take my own dishonour and disgrace lightly!” I exclaimed, almost leaping from my chair—“You ask too much!”
“My good fellow, I ask no more than is asked and expected of a hundred ‘society’ husbands to-day. Consider!—your wife has been led away from her soberer judgment and reasoning by an exalted and hysterical passion for me on account of my looks,—not for myself at all—because she really does not know Me,—she only sees me as I appear to be. The love of handsome exterior personalities is a common delusion of the fair sex—and passes in time like other women’s diseases. No actual dishonour or disgrace attaches to her or to you,—nothing has been seen, heard, or done, in public. This being so, I can’t understand what you are making a fuss about. The great object of social life, you know, is to hide all savage passions and domestic differences from the gaze of the vulgar crowd. You can be as [p 378] bad as you like in private—only God sees—and that does not matter!”
His eyes had a mocking lustre in them,—twanging his mandoline, he sang under his breath,
“If she be not fair for me
What care I how fair she be!”
“That is the true spirit, Geoffrey,”—he went on—“It sounds flippant to you no doubt in your present tragic frame of mind,—but it is the only way to treat women, in marriage or out of it. Before the world and society, your wife is like Cæsar’s, above suspicion. Only you and I (we will leave God out) have been the witnesses of her attack of hysteria ...”
“Hysteria, you call it! She loves you!” I said hotly—“And she has always loved you. She confessed it,—and you admitted that you always knew it!”