“Like Providence shapes our ends,” she sneered with modulated savageness. “Ah, this marriage truly is an experiment! Look at those two at the window—that girl and that man, that stunted creature there! Perhaps he’s an artist. She has a measly look and the man’s nose is awful! They are not a scrap like Browning’s artist and the girl, and yet, I fancy, they think themselves in love with one another—tell the man to stop for a minute!—here, here, at this house—there, do you see the idiotic simpers! Ah, yes, that’s love! And the two will marry, no doubt, on next Shrove Tuesday, but it won’t be an experiment, I don’t think either of the pair looks as if he or she went in for observing new phases.”
“They’ll have enough to do to keep the wolf from the door. Perhaps in time, instead of observing new phases they’ll punch one another’s heads if they must have fresh sensations.”
“Is that the usual and orthodox end to being in love—punching the head physically or morally, according to the rank of the lovers?”
“No, the methods vary according to the quality of the love. Have you had enough, shall we drive on?”
She nodded.
“If it’s worth its salt, of course there’s no end.”
“One even continuous stream into the ocean of—Nothingness! How appallingly trite and stale—nothing fresh, nothing new!”
“The state has a quite peculiar freshness and newness of its own, I am told, which is perennial—and here we are at the door.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Gwen dropped quite easily into the ways of her new home, she could generally adapt herself to mere physical conditions, her unnatural unrest and craving for excitement, in the first few weeks of her married life, were, of course, the symptoms of an abnormal mental condition.