"My promise? Oh, I remember. Of course I'll do what I can. There's the signal to move," she said hurriedly, gathering her fan and gloves together.
Farquharson stifled a sigh of relief as his wife left the room.
"That woman's insufferable," said Lady Wereminster. "How the man stands her I don't know. She trades on the patience that she knows he must possess to have reached his present position. Any woman, alas! has it in her personal power to make life unendurable for her husband, but I know of no surer method than persistently to wound his dearest susceptibilities. Dora treats Richard like a schoolboy—she would degrade a grocer if she lived with him long enough. 'My this, my that'—she makes me sick One feels tempted to remind her that the wife. who lays so frequent a stress on the possessive pronoun where her husband and children and house are concerned, is always suspected of holding them insecurely. Did you ever hear the story of the man who married a rich, vulgar wife, inclined to talk of 'my money, my garden, my furniture my dinner party,' etc., by way of pointing out the fact that she had paid for them? Before a room full of people one day she asked him, after some temporary absence, where he had been. 'Trying on your new trousers, which have just come back from the tailor's,' he answered. I hope she laid the lesson to heart."
"I wish you'd learn to take care of yourself, Evelyn," she went on, inconsequently, peering sharply at Mrs. Brand. "There ought to be some one at hand who would take care of you, and pet you, and carry you off to the country every time those hollows come under your eyes. You think too much, Evelyn. And unless you can kill thought, thought kills you, remember. That's why light amusements that take one out of oneself are popular."
"I get a lot of change one way and another," said Evelyn. "I go out, I mean."
"It's no good to go out if you don't go out with the right person," said Lady Wereminster. "One has always to pay a price for happiness, although it does not seem to cost much at the time. Women sign a blank cheque for it—a most foolish proceeding. It's filled in by the recipient, and when the amount falls due there's nothing left to meet it. But we are poor economists, and even spend ourselves if we have nothing else to spend."
"I can't have you two monopolizing each other all the evening," complained Dora Farquharson, looking up, aggrieved. "I wish those men would come up. How long they are. It's always so dull without men. And you must both be longing to be let in to this evening's secret—oh, perhaps you don't even know there is a secret?"
"If you know it, it can no longer be called one," said Lady Wereminster tartly.
Dora bridled.
"I think a woman should begin as she means to go on, in marriage. I told Richard from the first that I expected to know everything about his work—all the secrets, I mean; not the dull part."