Was that being a good wife to him? To divorce her soul, her best self, from him? If she confined her duty to the preservation of the mere material tie, what would she make of herself? Of him?
It came to her that his need of her was deeper and more spiritual than that. She argued that there must be something fine in him, or he never would have appreciated her. That other woman didn't count; she had thrust herself on him. When it came to choosing, he had chosen a spiritual woman! (Anne had no doubt that she was what she aspired to be.) And since all things were divinely ordered, Walter's choice was really God's will. God's hand had led him to her.
It had been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had married—spiritually—beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully, seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to give than to receive.
Their marriage, in this its new, its immaterial consummation, would not be unequal. She would raise Walter. That, of course, was what God had meant her to do all the time. Never again could she look at her husband with eyes of mortal passion. But her love, which had died, was risen again; it could still turn to him a glorified and spiritual face; it could still know passion, a passion immortal and supreme.
But it was an emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with nervous trepidation.
He came in as if nothing had happened. He sank with every symptom of comfortable assurance into the opposite arm-chair. And he asked no more formidable question than, "How's your headache?"
"Better, thank you."
"That's all right."
He did not look at her, but his eyes were smiling as if at some agreeable thought or reminiscence. He had apparently assumed that Anne had recovered, not only from her headache, but from its cause. To Anne, tingling with the tension of a nervous crisis, this attitude was disconcerting. It seemed to reduce her and her crisis to insignificance. She had expected him to be tingling too. He had more cause to.
"Do you mind my smoking? Say if you really do."