"She has always been followed, I imagine," said Lady Verny, giving him his tea, "and she has always known it."
Julian looked pleased; this was the kind of wife he wanted, a woman used to admiration, and who never made the fatal mistake of seeking it. He had not much knowledge of women, but he had very strong opinions about them, unshaken by any personal reckoning. One opinion was that nothing too much can be done for a good woman. She must be protected, cared for, and served under every ordeal in life. She must be like a precious jewel; bars, safes, banks, must be constructed to insure her inaccessibility from all the dangers of the open world.
She must be seen—the East receded from him at this point—and admired; but she must be immaculate. That is to say, she must at no time in her career personally handle an experience. She must be a wife and mother (unmarried women, though often presumably virtuous, were only the shabby bankrupts of their sex), but, once married and a mother, she must be kept as far as possible from all the implications of these tremendous facts.
Bad women were unsexed. That is to say, no law applied to them; they were as outcast as a man who cheats at cards. The simile was not exact, as the women were occasionally themselves the cheated; but it was near enough for Julian. There were of course considerably more female outcasts than card-sharpers; but this was fortunate, for inadvertently they protected good women, in a manner in which card-sharpers have not been known to protect good men. But Julian thought men needed no protection, only women who were safe, needed it.
Julian was kinder to women than his opinions promised, because, being strong, he was on the whole gentle toward those who were weak; but his kindness was a personal idiosyncrasy, not a principle.
Lady Verny looked at him a little helplessly. There was something she wanted very much to say to him, but she suffered from the disability of being his mother. There is an unwritten law that mothers should not touch upon vital matters with their sons. Lady Verny believed that Julian was a victim of passion. She did not think he had understood Marian's nature, and she knew that when passion burns itself out, one of two things is left, comradeship or resentment. She had lived with resentment for twenty years, and she knew that it was not an easy thing to live with, and that it would have been worth while had she known more about it earlier, to have found out if there was comradeship under the passion before the flames of it had burned her boats.
"I wonder," she said consideringly, gazing into the bottom of her tea-cup, "if your lovely Marian has a sense of humor?"
"Humor?" said Julian, taking two savory sandwiches and wrapping them in bread and butter. "What does she want with humor at her age? It's one of the things people fall back on when they've come croppers. Besides, I don't believe in comradeship between the sexes. Infernally dull policy; sort of thing that appeals to a bookworm. What I like is a little friendly scrapping. Honor's easy! I never have cared much for brains in a woman."
He smiled at the woman he knew best in the world, who had brains, and had given him the fruit of them all her life, with kindly tolerance.
Probably she was jealous; but she wouldn't be tiresome if she was, and he would make things as easy for her as possible.