Well, she went first.
For a year afterwards Marston existed dangerously, always on the edge of a break-down. If he didn’t go over altogether it was because his work saved him. He had no consoling theories. He was one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological function, and that when your body’s dead, you’re dead. He saw no reason to suppose the contrary. “When you consider,” he used to say, “the nature of the evidence!”
It’s as well to bear this in mind, so as to realize that he hadn’t any bias or anticipation. Rosamund survived for him only in his memory. And in his memory he was still in love with her. At the same time he used to discuss quite cynically the chances of his marrying again.
It seems that in their honeymoon they had gone into that. Rosamund said she hated to think of his being lonely and miserable, supposing she died before he did. She would like him to marry again. If, she stipulated, he married the right woman.
He had put it to her: “And if I marry the wrong one?” And she had said, That would be different. She couldn’t bear that.
He remembered all this afterwards; but there was nothing in it to make him suppose, at the time, that she would take action.
We talked it over, he and I, one night.
“I suppose,” he said, “I shall have to marry again. It’s a physical necessity. But it won’t be anything more. I shan’t marry the sort of woman who’ll expect anything more. I won’t put another woman in Rosamund’s place. There’ll be no unfaithfulness about it.”
And there wasn’t. Soon after that first year he married Pauline Silver.
She was a daughter of old Justice Parker, who was a friend of Marston’s people. He hadn’t seen the girl till she came home from India after her divorce.