But as she spoke she knew very well that, unknown to himself, he had already decided; that the joy and triumph the offer had brought to him were both too great for him eventually to resist them. He sat down and re-read the letter.
She had said the truth to him, but she had not said all the truth. She had a certain desire that he should justify her marriage in the eyes of the world by some political career brilliantly followed; but this was not her chief motive in wishing him to return to the life of cities. She had seen that he was in a manner disquieted, discontented, and attributed it to discontent at the even routine of their lives. The change in his moods and tempers, the arbitrary violence of his love for her, vaguely alarmed and troubled her; she seemed to see the germ of much that might render their lives far less happy. She realised that she had given herself to one who had the capacity of becoming a tyrannical possessor, and retained, even after six years of marriage, the irritable ardour of a lover. She knew that it was better for them both that the distraction and the restraint of the life of the world should occupy some of his thoughts, and check the over-indulgence of a passion which in solitude grew feverish and morbid. She had not the secret of the change in him, of which the result alone was apparent to her, and she could only act according to her light. If he grew morose, tyrannical, violent, all the joy of their life would be gone. She knew that men alter curiously under the sense of possession. She felt that her influence, though strong, was not paramount as it had been, and she perceived that he no longer took much interest in the administration of the estates, in which he had shown great ability in the first years of their marriage. She had been forced to resume her old governance of all those matters, and she knew that it was not good for him to live without occupation. She feared that the sameness of the days, to her so delightful, to him grew tiresome. To ride constantly, to hunt sometimes, to make music in the evenings——this was scarcely enough to fill up the life of a man who had been a viveur on the bitumen of the boulevards for so long.
A woman of a lesser nature would have been too vain to doubt the all-sufficiency of her own presence to enthral and to content him; but she was without vanity, and had more wisdom than most women. It did not even once occur to her, as it would have done incessantly to most, that the magnificence of all her gifts to him were title-deeds to his content for life.
Public life would be her enemy, would take her from the solitudes she loved, would change her plans for her children's education, would bring the world continually betwixt herself and her husband; but since he wished it that was all she thought of, all her law.
'Surely he will accept?' said Mdme. Ottilie, who had returned from the south of France.
'Yes, he will accept,' said his wife. 'He does not know it, but he will.'
'I cannot imagine why he should affect to hesitate. It is the career he is made for, with his talents, his social graces.'
'He does not affect; he hesitates for my sake. He knows I am never happy away from Hohenszalras.'
'Why did you write then to Kunst?'
'Because it will be better for him; he is neither a poet nor a philosopher, to be able to live away from the world.'