It was only when the flat was in order, and life began to run smoothly, that she realized how much easier, as far as outward circumstances were concerned, existence had become. It was, as she had suggested to Robert, very simple to see little of one another. When her husband was indoors he was always in his study. But Robert was very little at home in those days.
Cecily asked no questions. He went his way; she hers. London seized them both, and whirled them, for the most part, in opposite directions. When they met, it was with friendliness, tempered on Robert’s side with an implied, perfunctory reproach. “Remember this is your doing. This state of things is the outcome of your wish,” was what his manner expressed, while with visible relief he accepted his freedom. Cecily sometimes smiled when, directly after one of their infrequent lunches together, she heard the front door bang, and listened to her husband’s impatient summons for the lift. The smile was still bitter, but, as time went on, it hurt less.
In those early days in town, Cecily saw her husband very mercilessly. The scales had so completely dropped from her eyes that her clearness of vision startled even herself. There were times when, heightened by fierce jealousy, her old passion for him revived so strongly that she could scarcely restrain herself from the madness of throwing herself into his arms, appealing to him, begging him to come back to her—to love her. At such moments she always had the sensation of being held tight by some one who laughed, some one who said coldly, “You fool! When he’s hurrying to another woman, to whom, if you are lucky, he will speak of you ‘quite nicely.’” And when she had raged, and fought, and struggled till she had exhausted herself, she was always thankful for the iron arms that had held her, and the icy voice that had checked her passion.
It was after the subsidence of such an outbreak of emotion, that she generally saw Robert dispassionately, as an outsider might have seen him, or rather with an amount of penetration which no outsider, however dispassionate, could have attained. She acquired an almost preternatural insight, a sort of projection of her mind into his, so that she actually witnessed his self-deception, saw the clouds which he purposely, yet almost without his own volition, raised between his own consciousness and naked truth. She realized, with something that was almost scornful amusement, how the idea of inviting Mayne, with all that such an invitation might imply, had first struck him. How he had thrust the thought from him as a poisonous snake,—and invited Mayne. She saw how, by this time, he had allowed himself to acquire merit by encouraging Mayne’s visit. His wife was unreasonable (because she didn’t know anything)—this, in his mind also, appeared in parenthesis, and was so lightly skimmed in thought that it scarcely counted. Besides, when she had expressed her wish for their practical separation, there had been nothing, and that made all the difference, and brought him on happily to the contemplation of his own generosity in welcoming a friend of hers, at a time when she was not even aware that there was also a friend of his for whom the same cordiality might be expected.
It was with a shock sometimes that she found herself making a minute analysis of her husband’s mental condition with a degree of calmness, of interest even, at which she could only wonder. In the meantime, as far as outward interests and preoccupations were concerned, she made haste to fill her life. In her determination to do this she had never wavered since her talk with Mayne. The hours must be filled. So far as occupation went, she could and would “pull herself together.” She began to look up her old friends, and found them more than willing to receive her. Cecily had always been popular, and her husband was beginning to be well known, and probably, also, beginning to grow rich. Whether she owed her immediate acceptance to the memory of her own former charm, or to the more tangible advantages she now offered as the wife of a popular novelist, Cecily wisely did not inquire. She wanted acquaintances. She could have them for the asking. And she was grateful for one friend.
Mayne was living at his club while he considered at his leisure a fresh campaign of exploration. He and Cecily saw one another frequently. But it was not till she took his incessantly urged advice and began to write, that she felt that any of her methods of filling the hours were more than husks which she ate for lack of good bread. Often on looking back to the day when she first took up her work again, she thought with wonder of the occasion. It was the day Robert had expressed his desire to employ the services of Philippa Burton as secretary. Rather to Cecily’s surprise he had been in to lunch. It was nearly a month, she reflected, since such a thing had happened, and her surprise deepened when, instead of going directly the meal was at an end, he asked for coffee, and lighted a cigarette. For a time he talked disjointedly on indifferent topics, bringing the conversation round at last to his work and its many vexations.
“I’ve got more than I can do,” he declared, with a worried frown. “Brough is bothering for those short stories, and there’s my new novel, and the play, and half my time’s taken up with business letters and all the machinery of the thing.” He paused as if in thought. “I really think a secretary would pay me,” he exclaimed presently.
“Why not have one, then?” asked Cecily, taking a cigarette from the box between them.
“I don’t know how to—— What about Miss Burton?” he suggested, concluding the hesitating sentence sharply, as though the idea had just occurred to him. “She does shorthand, and she’s very hard up, poor girl. She was at Lady Wilmot’s yesterday when I called.”
Cecily lighted her cigarette, and walked with it to the window-seat, where she sat down with her back to the light.