“I’ve known that for eleven years,” I said, “but the difficulty has been to get the same idea firmly into her head. At any rate, it’s in now. I’ve tattooed it on every square inch of her mind, so to speak. If I had been let alone she would have been my downtrodden, ill-used wife, and I should have been squandering her money for the last ten years. I shall have to hammer her twice a day and get heavily into debt to make up for lost time. Why don’t you marry yourself, Sinclair? That is what you want, though you don’t know it; what I want, what we all want, someone to bully, something weaker than ourselves to trample on.”
“Don’t I know it!” he said. “I know it well enough. But how am I to find her?”
“Marry Lady Valenes. I’m sure you’ve made trouble and scandal enough in that quarter. Now old Valenes is dead you ought to marry her; and she’s more beautiful than ever. I saw her at the opera last night.”
Sinclair stared straight in front of him with his long hands on his knees. His face, thickened and coarsened, fell easily into lines of fatigue and ill temper.
“What is the use of Lady Valenes to me?” he said savagely. “What is the use of any woman in the world, except the right one?”
“Well, you acted as if she was the right one when her poor jealous old husband was alive. It’s just like you to think she won’t do now he is dead and she is free.”
He was silent again.
I was somewhat mollified by the remembrance that I had got Mildred, the most elusive and difficult of women, firmly under my thumb at last, and I said:
“The truth is, you don’t know what love is, you haven’t got it in you to care a pin about anyone except yourself, or you would have married years ago. Who do you think you’re in love with now?”
“The same woman,” he said wearily, “always the same.”