“A man who has failed to keep his wife’s love deserves to lose it,” said Frank glibly, who was opening the champagne.
“Frank, you say you love me. Suppose I said I was tired of the life I lead, that there is something in me that shrinks from deception, that I like all the cards on the table. Would you take me away?”
The cork popped loudly at the moment, and he had to quickly pour some of the champagne into her glass.
“Darling, I should only be too proud. You ought to know that.”
Was it his preoccupation with the champagne, or was there something wrong with his tone or his words? What had she expected him to say? Then she pulled herself together with a laugh.
“To love is human, to marry—sometimes divine. Don’t be afraid, mon ami. I’m not cut out for those heroics, or,” she added, “you either.”
He was inwardly relieved, for a man could never be sure what a highly-strung, emotional woman like Claudia would expect of him. She was adorable, she was well-born and clever, but—no, he was not cut out for “heroics.” As much as he could be, he was desperately in love with her; it was perfectly true that the thought of her obsessed his days and nights. But love to him was a pleasant thing, a serious light-mindedness in which a little pretence was necessary on either side. They might sigh together over the impossibility of spending their lives together; they might regret that they had not met before she entered into the legal compact; they might even indulge in rosy dreams of a future if she “ever became free,” but they would be very careful not to endanger her reputation or cause her spouse to set her free. Bourgeois born, reared among ideals of hypocritical respectability, Frank Hamilton had secretly a horror of anything outré, such as the Divorce Court. It would probably make very little difference to his career as an artist, but his innate conventionality revolted at the thought.
“If you would trust yourself to me, I would try and prove worthy of your bounty,” he said humbly. “My dearest, you wring my heart by these doubts of me. Don’t you yet believe in my love?”
She was playing with the wing of a chicken.
“How can one tell love from passion? Do you know?”