So that the rancour, if there was any, was not only persistent, but seemed to have a curiously desultory quality as well.
"Well—go on," I said.
But here she broke out suddenly: "But surely, George, even you can see where the Ape must have hurt her!"
"As I've neither seen the lady nor read her book——"
"But you know what his book's all about.... It was in her childlessness that she felt it."
"What!" I cried. "Is anybody so stupid as to suppose that a man like Derwent Rose would——"
"Wait a bit. Look at it as she sees it. She married at twenty-nine. She's forty-one now. And nothing's happened, and nothing's likely to. They were boy and girl together. Now suppose I'd had an affair with somebody in my young days, and had married somebody else, and then he'd gone and—rubbed it in. I don't think I should have written a Parthian Arrow even then, but I'm not going to drop dead when I hear that another woman did."
"But—ten years!"
"Doesn't that just prove it?" she cried triumphantly. "If she'd had a baby the first year she'd probably have forgotten all about her book. But when the second year came, and the third, and the fourth—well, thank God I've got my Jennie at school; but I can guess. These things get worse for a woman instead of better as time goes on. And now she's forty-one. I can't say I see very much mystery about those ten years."
"But," I said, "all this rests on the assumption that at one time they were lovers. He certainly didn't speak as if that had been so."