“One can’t call one’s soul one’s own with such a man!” she muttered, “it’s bondage worse than death. Talk of that cobbler, he’s not the only man who holds his wife’s soul on an awl—oh, the horrible, horrible, horrible indecency of marriage without love! And this vile pretence of fair living!” she went on, sitting up and staring out of the window, “the jokes we have together, and the talks!”
She got up and went about the room examining the curiosities, the stuffed birds, and the shells, and the awful oleographs.
“What’s this?” she said, lifting the glass from some glittering object, but she dropped it as if it stung her.
“Ah, why did I touch it? I am sick to death of everything.”
She went over to the sofa and flung herself back among the cushions.
It was a great slab of frosted wedding-cake, kept over for the first christening.
“Oh, it’s all a most frantic joke!” she said. “Here he comes, I must sit up and play to my audience, knowing all the time the audience sees into the marrow of my bones.”
She was not perhaps quite sane, as saneness goes, all through their lunch, but she was strangely brilliant, her eyes flashed with a queer fluttering light, her lips were soft and mobile, and she ate her chicken with a will, and only that her natural fineness of nature restrained her, she would have seized the big old cut-glass decanter of wine and have drained it at a gulp. But she kept the curb well on and never once flagged in her course, which surprised herself even more than it did her husband.
But when he went out to see the horses put in she had a little private collapse all to herself.
It was hotter than ever and the flies grew more troublesome, but it was all very fresh and green.