Claire did not seem so pleased with our renewed family life that resembled so curiously the life we had lived round your mother five years before. Her smile was bitter, her tongue caustic, but she looked so ill, that I put her temper down to bad health. It was, strangely enough, Philibert who explained to me, driving home from his mother’s one Sunday afternoon.
“You mustn’t mind Claire,” he began. “She is in trouble.”
“I don’t. I can see she is in wretched health.”
“Her health is the result, not the cause, of her unhappiness.”
“Oh?”
“Her husband has fallen into the hands of a scheming woman who wants to marry him. He has threatened Claire with a divorce.”
I was taken aback. I stammered. For an instant I wanted to laugh, but Claire’s haggard face was after all nothing to laugh at. I remarked mildly; “But I thought that in your world one didn’t divorce?”
“He’s not of our world, never was, never will be. Besides, it bores him, he’s had enough of us.”
“I see.”