“Well, I wish I had a chance to waste some.... Bed, Claudia. I am sure no one would ever think you missed your beauty-sleep, but I fear you often do.” He turned towards the door, but she recalled him.
“Gilbert!”
“Yes?”
“Are we always going to live like this? This is the first opportunity we have had for a talk for—oh! weeks! When we have people here, you always fall into bed the moment the last guest goes; when we do go out together we just have a few minutes in the car on the way home. Gilbert, I——” Having got so far she hesitated and cast a quick, appealing look at him. He came a little nearer.
“Is there anything you particularly want to say to me?” he said, uncomprehending, but noticing the convulsive rise and fall of her white bosom under its laces and pearls. What had upset her?
“Gilbert, other men find me attractive ... other men like my company ... you realize that, don’t you?” she said, with unexpected directness.
He raised his eyebrows, and then they met in a frown. He found her words in bad taste, which was not usual with Claudia.
“I quite appreciate that my wife is admired by other——”
“Yes, but I am your wife. Somehow—to-night—I feel I must speak plainly and tell you—that I am not satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the legislative table. Once, before we were married, I warned you that such scraps would not satisfy me. I want more. Any woman, unless she were as cold as a stone and had only married you for her own ends, would want more. Why, we are hardly friends even! Oh, I don’t want to know the details of your work, but you never discuss anything with me. I am as lonely as I was before I married you.... I thought I was entering a land of plenty. You made me think so. I knew I should never be content with a conventional marriage.” She caught her breath for a moment. “Yes, I remember my very words to you—‘Love is the only convention that I own.’ Have you forgotten?... If you value me and my love, think over what I have said and look where we have drifted, Gilbert. I daresay you haven’t noticed—that is the worst part of it all—that we have drifted at all. Perhaps you think that we stand where we did eighteen months ago.... We none of us ever stand still even for a single day and there’s a pretty strong current that catches restless, unsatisfied women nowadays. And—I am not satisfied, I am not satisfied.”
With a sudden abrupt movement, so foreign to her that it showed how much she had been keeping herself in leash, she went out and closed the door behind her.