Bridget moved back a step abruptly. She locked her hands tightly together before she spoke.
“That,” she replied, in a low distinct voice, “is a cowardly insinuation, and you know it to be a false one. Will you deny that I have spoken of this to you before? that I have urged it upon you as best for both of us? The fact that you have always treated the matter contemptuously doesn’t alter the case at all. I have lived this life too long,” she went on. “I see, I realize every day, every hour, that I’ve been weak and cowardly not to have insisted upon my freedom before! But—but—” her low passionate voice broke a little—“I dreaded to do it, for mother chiefly, and I always thought, hoped I was to blame, that I hadn’t tried enough, that—” she paused. “Heaven knows I have tried!” she cried, with a change of voice, raising her head, and looking him full in the face. “Paul! speak honestly. If you can, for one moment, lay aside that sneering, cynical, hateful trick of speech of yours; speak like a human being for once, and say if there is in your heart one spark of love or affection for me any more!”
He quailed for one moment before her brilliant eyes. Then he recovered himself.
“Love? My dear child, you are remarkably young! You are a very beautiful woman, Bridget,” he said critically, turning his head languidly on one side, with an impartial air. “It’s a pity you waste yourself upon Adelphi melodrama. Why not try Ibsen even? Ibsen is dull, but not altogether meretricious.”
“You have answered my question,—in your own way, of course, but you have answered it,” she said, slowly. “You have no love for me, yet you are unwilling to let me go. Because people say—because some people praise my looks, it pleases you to think of me as your property,—yours, exclusively. You have taken care to try to crush everything that is best in me,—everything that makes me an individual, a person, my work, my hopes, my ideals. It is my beauty only you want to keep! That is your side of the matter. As for me—” she stopped. “I have only one active feeling left towards you.”
He bent a little towards her.
“And that is?”
“Contempt!” she answered swiftly, with a deep breath. “You will admit, I think (except of course that the case admits of an excellent opportunity for a paradox), that with these as the predominant feelings on either side, our marriage can hardly be described as a success! I never realized so terribly as to-night,” she went on, after a moment, the scorn in her voice giving place to intense earnestness, “how terribly, how irrevocably, we two people have drifted apart. Why, I scarcely notice your insults now! I hardly noticed them to-night. I am indifferent. Words which, three years ago, I think I should have died to hear from your lips, don’t touch me, don’t affect me. Oh, I feel degraded, hateful in my own sight, to have lived with you, as your wife, so long! I’m no better than any poor woman in the street out there!” she cried with a gesture. “Better? I’m worse—worse! Perhaps they don’t always despise and hate the men who— But I will be vile no longer. I can’t breathe in this life.” Her hand went swiftly to her throat, as though she felt physical suffocation. “For the sake of this cowardly keeping up of appearances, I’ve filled the house with people I dislike, I’ve had to listen to and learn their empty, meaningless, surface-clever talk—to lead their artificial, unnatural life. I’m tired of it—weary of it all—already; and here I am,”—she flung out her hands with a quick, vivid gesture,—“young and strong, with years and years before me perhaps. I will not waste my life like this! I too am an individual! I too have my art to think of—you and your friends, with that word forever on your lips, till one sickens at the sound of it, cannot reasonably deny my right to its expression. But I must have freedom—real, natural life. I must touch what is vital, enduring, again.”
She paused, shaken and trembling, resting her hand against the mantel-piece to steady herself.
“I’m really sorry to interrupt you; for though it’s a style I don’t admire, you do it well—excellently well. Still, there are a few practical points to be considered when you descend from the rarefied atmosphere, which seems already to have affected your breathing.” He regarded her with an air of mild curiosity as he spoke, adjusting his eye-glasses with precision.