She used to dog his steps with the patient sleuth-like tread of an intent panther. She followed him into strange places often enough—unseen. She was always watching, waiting. Other wives waited and watched, hoping all the time that nothing was wrong, that they still had faithful husbands, might still keep their homes together with honor. But Pamela dogged Edred desperately—much more desperately than she would have done had there been the smallest chance of happiness left for them. She only fiercely prayed that there might be some entanglement, that there was some other woman—weak, innocent, or criminal—in the background. It meant so much more to her than mere conjugal peace and trust; her experience had made her bitterly scornful of married life: you could never successfully blend romance and joint housekeeping. She was playing for a much higher, nobler stake—her own independence. A wife was an individual first, a mere married woman afterward. She was conscious from time to time of the absolute isolation of each human being who treads the world.
One flesh! Bare hearts! What empty jargon! One could look into the other one’s eyes and be breeding murder, worse than murder, all the time. This life, the beings with whom we were accidentally thrown in contact during our half-conscious sojourn—mere detail! There was a splendid, terrifying isolation about everyone. Each alone! She used to look at them curiously, speculatively; figures moving along the yellow streets at night, in tender twos, in merry companies—and yet alone. Each one shut in, cut off from all perfect communion, by the film of his own individuality. Each brain its own secret world. Each body, under such varying garments, absolutely its own, in spite of vows, ardent protestations, respectable and legal shackles.
She used to brood thus, a little at random, as she warily trod the streets behind that slim, carefully-dressed figure. She had become a strange perversion. She loved her husband still, in a headlong, fierce way. Yet she longed for him to commit himself, so that her love might puff away, become impalpable, like smoke rising in a clear sky. There was no chance for her, no freedom, no self-respect until she became callous, until that hot, wayward heart of hers was dammed up. She had read—in a girl’s superficial way—of first love as a potent thing. She hadn’t known then that it could be such a sweeping, crowning, involuntary thing—hadn’t dreamed that it could hold you in such grim, iron grasp. She couldn’t get away from the magnetism of—the first. She despised him; sometimes, for a clear moment, she loathed him. She remembered that on one occasion it had been a keen struggle to throw down the bread knife on the wooden platter instead of slitting it through his long lean throat.
And yet! He had only to call the old playful, indulgent light into his lazy eyes, only to carelessly flip at her some gesture or word of the past, to bring her under his heel—quivering body, small subject soul. It was horrible to be in such bondage to a man—just because he had been first. Only because!
One night near Holywell Street she saw him meet a woman. She followed them down the Strand, an odd, glad singing in her head. The moment had come.
She studied that woman with a woman’s minute, critical eye. She wasn’t satisfied. The woman was respectable, obviously, insolently respectable. She looked like the mistress of a maid-of-all-work and a flawless little house.
She hadn’t the right atmosphere. She took Edred’s arm, hanging on it stolidly and looking at other women on the pavements with a sort of virtuous sneer, seeming to say, “I have a perfect right; can any of you say as much?” They might have been an aggressively respectable married couple from South London going to dine at a restaurant by way of dissipation.
As a matter of fact they turned in at one. Pamela watched Edred push back the heavy door and gravely stand aside for his companion to pass in first. There was no eagerness in his attitude; he seemed quite used to it, not exactly weary, but coldly stolid. He wore the settled air of a married man—the mild, contented, resigned air of doom, which so many husbands wear. He was neither unhappy nor happy; he took this evening meal in the crush and steam and the hurry of waiters as a matter of course. Why not?
She didn’t pretend to understand him—or her. They were an odd couple. Nothing stealthy, illicit, ecstatic about them, when there should have been a suggestion of all three emotions!
The woman wore brown—the frump’s unfailing refuge: it was a hot, reddish sort of brown; her hat, anxious to be in the fashion, was painfully skewered to her head by many pins. There were fresh touches of pink about her at ridiculously unwanted spots. She looked pleased, shy; like a child dressed for a party.