“Of what did your mother warn you?” said Claudia, her nostrils dilating, her eyes flashing. “Of marrying me? I insist on an answer.”
“This isn’t the first scandal in your family, is it? I’m not throwing your mother’s sins up against you, you are not responsible for her; but why on earth have you got the same flair for the sensational? You’ve deliberately courted this by going to see this—this woman.”
“Don’t call her ‘this woman,’ as though she were a leper,” said Claudia passionately. “She’s earned her living by hard work ever since she was fourteen years old. How many women can boast of that? What if she hasn’t led a conventional life? A good many women whom you shake by the hand are a good deal less virtuous, and certainly far less honest. Because she hasn’t dodged behind a wedding-ring or covered up her tracks you look upon her with contempt. And even if she were the most unscrupulous, mercenary creature alive, you might be sorry now. Twenty-two, and life over for her!” To Claudia, with her Grecian appreciation of youth and life, this seemed a tragedy of tragedies. Once, as a child, when a gambolling puppy from the stables had got under the wheels of the brougham and been killed she had wept for days, and as she had looked down at the little fat white body that would never frisk any more, she had learned a lesson never to be forgotten. The puppy had taught her early to see the inestimable boon of youth and life. To be alive, to have all one’s faculties and powers of enjoyment, that is the great gift of the gods, she had told herself then. There had always been something of the pagan in her, and she had ever refused to believe that death is the gate of Life.
“So you are sprouting the modern jargon, are you?” said Gilbert angrily. “Listen, Claudia. You married me, and you must respect my name. I thought you were different from the women in your set, or I should not have married you. Apparently you are not different, but I am different from the husbands of those women. You’d better remember that. I allow you to go your own way, I give you perfect liberty, but on condition that you do not drag my name into club smoking-rooms and smart restaurants. There has never been a breath of talk about my mother, and there shall not be about my wife. If you want that kind of notoriety—you will not remain my wife.”
Claudia stood motionless, listening to this outburst, very erect, her head thrown up, her neck making a beautiful but disdainful line with her chin. A sarcastic, enigmatic smile played round her sensitive mouth, and her eyes were cold and keenly critical. She had suddenly seen the coarseness of his lips, the deadly, soul-destroying coldness of his self-satisfied, sombre eyes. He was merely a male, a high-handed, aggressive male, with the highly specialized brain of a lawyer. Heart? When had he ever shown any heart? She had never once touched his heart, only his senses. His feeling for his mother and father was only a sort of clannish family pride. Why, even Jack’s love for Fay, lacking as it was in all the big qualities that make love worth while, was a much finer thing than Gilbert’s feeling for her. For a moment a revulsion of shame, a feeling of humiliation swept over her at the thought of what she had given him.
“If you were not afraid of being laughed at, of being made to look small, you wouldn’t care a jot what I did, would you?” she said with deadly precision. “You have a profound contempt for women, haven’t you? You married me for my looks, because I aroused your passion, because it is the general habit of man to instal a woman in his home. I am installed here and I have the privilege of calling myself Mrs. Currey; otherwise, had I been a woman of lower station and more easy virtue, you would have fired me out long ago, wouldn’t you? I am to live on the ashes of your passion—I, a woman with no children! You are asking too much, my husband. As for that poor, maimed child, I shall go to her as often as she wants me.”
She was surprised, when he had gone, at the calmness with which she could turn to her ordinary occupations. She felt anger, contempt, the sting of her own humiliation, but he had no longer the power to wound her heart. She remembered the time—was it ages ago or only a year or so?—when, after an altercation or lack of response on his part, she had fled to her room and sobbed or brooded until she had made herself ill. Then her being had been shaken to its foundations, and she had felt the results on her nervous system for days.
But this morning, once the fierce blaze of her anger had burned out, she shrugged her shoulders and sat down to her escritoire. She must make her life without Gilbert. To allow a man she neither loved nor respected to destroy her balance would be a sign of weakness.
She was organizing, with Colin Paton, a concert in aid of a home for Penniless Gentlewomen, a charity which had always aroused her sympathy, and there was a good deal to be done. She was herself feeing Mrs. Milton to sing, and she had promised to come in that morning and give her some advice on the other artistes to be engaged.