‘Is there one among them,’ he thought, ‘for whom she cares?’
He was nothing to her: but he would be something to such an one if ever he could find his foe.
He was hurt, wounded, humiliated, infuriated, all in one; conscious of a defeat which made him grotesque in her sight, sensible of an act of unwisdom and of sentimentality which had only placed him lower than ever in the estimation of a woman whom he was furiously conscious that he still loved and still desired.
When the hangings of the door had closed behind him, his wife laughed with an amusement which her sense of courtesy had controlled before, and put a tea-rose in the bosom of her gown.
‘How stupid, how intensely stupid, to come to me as he goes to his cocottes,’ she thought, with that irritation and ennui which were the only emotions which he ever aroused in her. ‘And to renew that sort of argument as if we were two greengrocers living at Montmartre! Decidedly, when the bon Dieu made poor Platon, he left out of his composition every vestige of tact; and really tact is the only quality that it is absolutely necessary for everybody to have to prevent them from irritating others. Who could have imagined that after six years he would begin again like that!—he has always a little access of tenderness at the end of the year; last time he gave me a dreadful Chinese idol as big as himself with green eyes; some dealer had told him it was very precious: he did not know, he never knows; I wonder if there were anybody so stupid in all the world; I am only astonished that he did not send for Sachs and Mitz as an agreeable surprise for me!’
‘Yes, Paul,’ she said aloud, ‘take away most of those flowers, they make my head ache; and give that case to Jeanne to put up in the jewel-safe. Tell Fedor that I shall want the horses in an hour.’
‘How very stupid some women must be,’ she reflected often, ‘to let themselves be dictated to, and denied, and bullied, and worried by their husbands. Nothing is so easy to manage as a man, if you only begin in the right way with him. All depends on how you begin; it is just like a horse; if you do not make him feel that you are his superior at once, he will take advantage of you for ever. I remember my mother saying to me before my marriage: “Ménage ton mari, sois bien douce.” Now, if I had listened to her, I should have had Platon on my shoulders all my life; I dare say, even, he would have expected me to please him, and to listen to him, and to accept all his absurdities. But I froze him from the first; he has always been intensely afraid of me. Of two people there is always one who is afraid, and I preferred that it should be he. It just shows what mind can do over matter.’
She looked listlessly at a pile of telegrams which her servant had brought in with him and laid on the little table near her.
‘They will all say the same thing,’ she thought indifferently, as she opened two or three which contained the usual greetings of the New Year from her innumerable relatives and friends in other countries and at other courts; no Russian, of course, amongst them.
‘If people must have it that a year begins, which is utterly absurd, why did they not take pretty pink and white April instead of this ugly, shivering, frost-bitten January?’ she said to her dog Dauphin, as she glanced through the tedious compliments of the telegrams. At last, amidst them, there was one which made her change colour as she read it. It was from Lady Brancepeth, away on her estates in the north of England. It was only a line; it said: