"Oh," said Mrs. Cooper. The wind was taken out of her sails. "Why, you are quite a genius! We shall have to take lessons. But now, I came to ask you to come with me, and I will show you your room, and we will have a little talk."
Millie rose obediently, and followed her aunt from the room; as they went, the masks dropped, the girls lifted their heads and looked at each other with intense interest.
"She's going to make her show the letter."
CHAPTER XII
THE JARRING ELEMENT
"She was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them."—JANE AUSTEN.
The first idea suggested by Mrs. Cooper to the mind of the beholder was almost inevitably the above. How could any man ever have liked her well enough to marry her?
Mr. Chetwynd-Cooper was among those unfortunates who are sent into the world without a sense of humour. He thus fell a victim to the same error of judgment which poor well-meaning King George the Third had committed before him: that of mistaking a dull, pretentious prig for a really good woman. Perhaps no queen in history, of whatever moral character, ever made a greater fiasco as the bringer-up of a large family than did Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. But in this respect Mrs. Cooper vied with her, and for the same reason. Each was so secure in her own belief in herself as possessed of all the domestic virtues, that to her the possibility of making a mistake never presented itself.
Such women are beyond the reach of argument. Mrs. Cooper had decided, quite early in life—on what grounds is not known—that to be such a woman as she was, ought to be the goal of all female endeavour. Hence, nothing could shake the complacency of her own content. She never tired of the pose of the perfect wife and mother, the parochial guardian angel; and this, although her nursery had been the epitome of untidiness and mismanagement, and her husband was obliged to keep her accounts, and in other ways to step into the breach continually to supply her glaring deficiencies. Neither was she discomposed by the fact that all her own children had found her out at an early age. If her husband ever broke through his habitual reserve, and remonstrated with her, she met him with the patient smile of the saint who is misunderstood.
Very soon after marriage he had found out the iron hand beneath her velvet glove. He had discovered that his own influence was nil, that argument could not move her, that opposition merely stiffened her smiling obstinacy. He had sunk into that life which is the most terrible form of solitude: complete isolation from those nearest to him. The worst of it was that, though he had no effect upon his wife, she had a gradual and insidious effect upon him. Continual contact with a dwarfed intelligence was causing inevitable deterioration, of which he was not aware.