Farquharson leant back in his chair and looked at her critically. He was very pale.
"Three minutes by the clock, my dear Dora. There's a prize given at Dunmow annually to the woman who talks longer and faster than any other in the competition. It doesn't matter what nonsense she talks. You would do well to enter for it. I believe it comes off in July."
Dora turned suddenly and confronted him. He looked at her as at a stranger. He had had little experience of hysterical women; the outward signs of his mother's conflicts with self had been so sternly repressed that it was only lately that he had guessed how often that rigid figure quailed under the strain of its inward wounds. No other woman had come into his life as more than a momentary pastime till he met Evelyn. The sight of his wife's short, stricken figure roused no pity in him, only disgust. He had had no very high ideal of women in childhood; that he should have linked himself to a woman whose motives were so mean, one who, having no real interest in the cause, could seek to degrade her husband's honour for the mere sake of satisfying personal curiosity, of flaunting her knowledge in the eyes of others, roused his disgust and shame.
He put his watch down on the table.
"In five minutes I shall expect you to leave the room," he said. "If you haven't withdrawn by then I shall ring for your maid. In any case I should advise you to send for her. You aren't yourself. I think even the glass in my dressing-room would fail to satisfy you as to your appearance at the present moment."
His cigarette case lay on the table; he reached his hand out for it, but paused midway.
Dora sprang at him, her eyes blazing. She clutched his arm in her grasp, almost like a mad woman.
"I hate you," she gasped. "You've killed my love. What right have you to make me suffer? to hurt me so appallingly, mentally, spiritually, physically? When I think of all I've got to bear for you it almost drives me mad. It's too humiliating and degrading. Weeks, months of pain for you—for you that I hate. I've seen the doctor to-day; he left just before you came. Nothing can save me. I've got to have a child—a child that will be like you, hard, cruel and implacable."
For a moment Farquharson sat in silence, aghast, shaken at the torrent of words. This was the explanation, then; the excuse of all the waywardness and hysteria he had not understood. He hardly knew if he was glad or sorry at the news. The dream-wife he had longed for would never now be his; ... the dream-child he had longed for, for whose dear sake he had striven to win Glune....
Dream-bride, dream-mother—he shut his eyes. And Dora was the reality, and Dora was suffering.... His anger died, and a wave of tenderness and sympathy, pity for her as well as for himself, and awe and wonder that even in this moment the new tie pulled at his heart-strings, made him stretch out his arms to her, and take her on his knee almost as though he loved her.