Never had her gift for inadequacy burst upon her husband in such a terrifying flash. For a moment he could not speak.
‘Quite good,’ he answered at last, incapable of saying more to a woman who would have been incapable of understanding it.
Isabel remained silent. Her eyes were fixed. Then she put out her hand in an eager gesture to stop the carriage.
‘Stop them, Gundred,’ she cried; ‘I want to get out. I am going up there into the glow and the glory. I am tired of this dull grey world. Kingston, come with me. Let us go and be gods on the heights.’
Gundred saw consent in her husband’s eyes. The carriage was stopped.
‘Well, don’t be late for dinner, darlings,’ she conditioned. ‘Remember, Aunt Minna will be arriving. Do you really think you will have time?’
‘What does time matter!’ exclaimed Isabel rebelliously. ‘There is no such thing.’
Kingston would have liked to go alone. Gundred had just succeeded in irritating him, he felt, to the last point of endurance. Her bland impenetrability was nothing short of tragic. Nothing could ever teach her what to say and what to leave unsaid, for nothing could teach her to feel. She had the sublime elephantine tactlessness of perfect self-satisfaction. Her husband, for one wild moment, wanted to get away from it all—from Gundred, level, monotonous, stodgy, yet unsatisfying; from the dear good old mother who did not count, who never could count; from Isabel, tormenting, tantalizing, odious Isabel. To be alone, up there in the radiance, far above the world of desire and dissatisfactions—that would be, at least for half an hour, rest and relief. But he was to have none; Isabel was to come, emphasizing at every point the exasperating perfections, the exasperating limitations of his wife. With her usual primitive clumsiness, so utterly at variance with Gundred’s well-drilled movements, Isabel flounced out of the carriage, alighting with a jumping flop that brought down a coil of hair and a shower of pins. Kingston noticed that, as usual, her placket was open. He waited in silence till she should have finished her untidy adjustments.
Gundred repeated her injunction.
‘Aunt Minna will be so surprised if you are not there in time to receive her,’ she said. ‘Do be certain that you have time, darling.’