If she had struck him in the face with her clenched fist she couldn’t have hurt him so much.
He didn’t understand that he’d come at the worst possible time for a reading of his book, when Joyce was deeply mortified by his contempt of her mother’s lecture, and more annoyed because of his casual regret and “let’s forget it!” regarding an incident which seemed far from trivial to her. It was contempt for her, as well as for her mother.
Bertram’s exasperated comments at the Wigmore Hall were another revelation of the wide gulf between her ideas and his. He was drawing further and further away from all the loyalties which she believed were the essential faith of an English gentleman, one of her class, one of those who stood for the things which belonged to her family and creed.
She had been irritated from the beginning by that book of his. It was ridiculous to think that Bertram could write! He had none of the brilliance of Kenneth Murless, and had shown himself plainly bored by the conversation of her friends on books and poetry. Even on that subject he had been hostile to their ideas, and had denounced the work of people like Stephen McKenna and W. L. George with contemptuous words as “unreal stuff.”
That book he was writing had been a cause of secret irritation in her mind. He had preferred it to her company. He had deliberately isolated himself in its scrawled sheets, instead of joining her little parties, and making himself agreeable to her crowd. The book had been a barrier between them. It had made him careless of getting a decent job. It had caused him to brood over the beastly war while she wanted him to forget it. He was probing the old wounds again, deliberately intensifying his morbid outlook on life. She guessed it was filled with his bitter, democratic, anti-class views, which seemed to her like treachery to England.
And anyhow, he wanted to read it to her at the very hour when she was going to have her hair curled by the girl from Truelove’s who was due at ten o’clock! Really Bertram was exasperating!
Perhaps that was what she had been thinking. Bertram worked it out in that way afterwards, some time afterwards, when he tried to analyse the reason for Joyce’s unkindness. Because it was unkind—damnably. It took all the grit out of him in its immediate effect.
Knocked all the stuffing out of him, as he put it to himself when he went downstairs again, flung his manuscript on the desk, and said “Hell!”
He hadn’t argued with her, just said, “Sorry I bothered you!” and then turned on his heel and went out of his wife’s room. He passed the girl from Truelove’s on the stairs, and thought bitterly that Joyce was more interested in her hair than in his book.