SHE had never seen his face look quite so strange, not even on that mad day in the stuffy Bloomsbury house when she helped him throw his things into the bag and he whispered hoarsely that “they” were after him. She was puzzled by the intensity of his expression. He didn’t love her, he was tired, anxious to be rid of her. That discovery of the contemptible woman in brown should have been propitious for him. And yet he seemed furious, and, more than that, afraid.
She had meant to calmly tell the truth. But two things froze the truth that lay ready on her tongue. She was afraid of him: he was a mere violent physical brute, in the mood to stamp on her, to drive his fist into her face: that was what it had come to—her tender, first romance. Her weak woman’s cowardice made her shiver with apprehension under her sweeping folds of cashmere. And then, apart from fear, she couldn’t tell him. She didn’t want him to know she knew.
It was humiliating, mortifying, delightful. She rapidly read her own heart. She loved him still. There was no solution. The common, dowdy woman that he had just left had no power to part them. She realized with fear, with self-reproach, with bitter shame, yet with relief, that any mere bodily sin he might commit was pardonable. Was there, then, no cardinal offense? Was she to go on loving in this despicable way until the very end?
She looked up from the book, smiling, yawning.
There was cunning in her big clear eyes, the cunning which even the frankest woman on earth has in reserve: handed down to her through generations of oppressed women, who have always been slaves.
Slaves! The word suddenly came; she couldn’t have told why. And while she sat back in the chair, chin up, eyes half afraid, mouth stiffly smiling, she was thinking scornfully that woman always had been and always would be slaves. They liked to be slaves. All this strident talk about freedom and rights was froth, propounded by those imbittered free women who hadn’t succeeded in finding a master.
“You said you were not coming back to dinner,” she said gayly, and then grew deadly pale as she suddenly remembered that he had said something about not coming back all night, if a certain business he had in hand took an anxious turn. He had said that he might be called away to Liverpool. Her lip curled. Liverpool! Kennington, more likely! That hat, that terrible gown, had looked like Kennington. Then she rallied. “You said you were not coming back to dinner, so I—I dined: a woman’s dinner, you know—an egg, some cake, and three cups of tea.”
“No lies!” he returned savagely. “What were you doing half an hour ago? An egg! Tea! There was a plate of rump-steak in front of you at the restaurant.”
She was by this time thoroughly steadied to hard, deliberate lying. She didn’t want to lose him. She didn’t mean to hand him over publicly to that woman. She loved him. She’d keep the semblance of him anyhow.
All her frenzied watching; all her deplorable spying; all her fierce assurance that unfaithfulness on his part would free her soul—ended in this. She was lying, in order to keep him.