“It’s usual,” he answered sulkily, not daring to express the astonishment with which her tone and manner filled him.
“What is usual?” she asked, looking straight at him with serene imperturbable coolness and entire refusal to meet him half way by any kind of comprehension.
“Well, it is, you know that,” he replied, looking down on the carpet.
“Usual for a woman to marry again seven weeks after her husband’s death? I never heard so. I believe there is a country where a widow does marry all her husband’s brothers one after another, as fast as she can, but that country is not England.”
She put her cigarette back into her mouth again.
He looked at her apprehensively and shyly as Jack did very often from under his long lashes. He was puzzled and he was humiliated. He had brought himself up with a rush to do what he thought honor and all the rest of it required of him, and his self-sacrifice was not even appreciated but derided.
“I thought, of course, you’d desire it on account of the children,” he said stupidly, insanely, for he should have known that truths like this cannot be told to women with any possibility of pardon to the teller of them.
She looked at him with an admirably imitated astonishment.
“For the children? For Cocky’s children? I am really unable to guess why.”
“Oh, damnation!”