“What on earth are you talking about?”
“She’s there, I tell you. She won’t let me. She’s pushing me back.”
He says Pauline must have thought he was drunk or something. Remember, she saw nothing but Edward, his face, and his mysterious attitude. He must have looked very drunk.
She sat up in bed, with her hard, black eyes blazing away at him, and told him to leave the room that minute. Which he did.
The next day she had it out with him. I gathered that she kept on talking about the “state” he was in.
“You came to my room, Edward, in a disgraceful state.”
I suppose Marston said he was sorry; but he couldn’t help it; he wasn’t drunk. He stuck to it that Rosamund was there. He had seen her. And Pauline said, if he wasn’t drunk then he must be mad, and he said meekly, “Perhaps I am mad.”
That set her off, and she broke out in a fury. He was no more mad than she was; but he didn’t care for her; he was making ridiculous excuses; shamming, to put her off. There was some other woman.
Marston asked her what on earth she supposed he’d married her for. Then she burst out crying and said she didn’t know.
Then he seems to have made it up with Pauline. He managed to make her believe he wasn’t lying, that he really had seen something, and between them they arrived at a rational explanation of the appearance. He had been overworking. Rosamund’s phantasm was nothing but a hallucination of his exhausted brain.