"But, Polly, they seem so attached to each other. How do you make that out? They are always anxious to please each other. He gives her everything she can possibly want, and she never contradicts him, or answers him sharply, or loses her temper, or anything."
"That's just where the main hitch is, you little simpleton! Don't you see they're much too polite, too ceremonious, too anxious, as you put it, to please each other to be a happy couple? Don't you see that their attitude of studied care, of smiling deference, is just assumed to hide something they don't want the world to see?"
"How sharp you are, Polly! How did you guess all that?"
"Instinct, I suppose—I have no experience to go by. And instinct tells me that it argues an extremely unwholesome state of domestic affairs to see a husband as polite, as courteously attentive to his wife, as Tom is to Addie."
"Yes, yes; you are right; he is very polite to her."
"He is treacherously so—smolderingly so, if there is such a word. To see that man walk across the room to relieve her of her cup, stand up to open the door for her when she passes out, hand her cushions, footstools, newspapers, in the way he does, with that sort of heavy mechanical gallantry, is simply unnatural, unwholesome, volcanic. Something will come of it sooner or later, mark my words, Charlotte Lefroy!"
Charlotte draws a quick excited breath, and clutches the sibyl's slim young arm.
"Oh, Pauline, it's like a picture out of a novel! Go on, go on! Something will come of it—eh?"
"For instance, now, you, in your ignorance and childish inexperience, imagine that Addie is at this moment pouring all her grievances into the marital ear, cooing perhaps at his feet, like the honeymoon pairs in 'Punch,' telling him how brutally we and the boys behaved to her while he was away."
"Yes, yes; say I imagine all that. Now what do you imagine, Pauline?"