Thus baited, Gundred grew furious. Her colour came and went, her manner became neater, cooler, blander than ever. And yet she could say so little. Mrs. Mimburn’s darts had found the weak spot that she was hiding even from herself. Through all her anger at Minne-Adélaïde’s insolence, the dialogue had for her a fearful, poignant interest that forbade her to follow her own first angry instincts, and cut it off with a snub.
‘I think you are quite mistaken,’ she replied. ‘And, anyhow, I should always be glad to see my husband being amused—no matter who it was by.’
‘Ah, you have the reckless unselfishness of the very young,’ answered Minne-Adélaïde intolerably. ‘That has wrecked so many marriages. “Trust nothing and nobody” ought to be one’s motto, and do all the amusing that may be necessary one’s self. It is safest in the long run—if one can do it, that is. However, you seem content to let someone else do it, and all I say is that I hope no harm will come of it. But when you want to take up your own position in your husband’s life again, you may find that someone else has filled it while you were ordering dinner and talking about the weather. It is even better, my dear, to bore your husband than to let him find that he can be kept amused all day and every day by someone else. I should get rid of the cousin, if I were you.’
‘Yes?’ answered Gundred, gelid with wrath, yet, despite herself, enthralled in Mrs. Mimburn’s dreadful foreshadowings. She began to have some notion what it was that she had been finding unsatisfactory in her relations with Kingston. He petted her more and more, but more and more did he talk to Isabel, and his recent efforts to include Gundred only revealed his inability to do so. This it was, this situation of her own making, that had been giving her secret, unacknowledged qualms, and feelings of vague hunger. The more proudly, then, did she revolt against Mrs. Mimburn’s insinuations, and the vigour of her anger was the measure of her inward conviction that the insinuations held some truth.
Minne-Adélaïde thought that she held Gundred helpless. She presumed on her power, made reckless at once by boredom and by gratified spite.
‘Oh, well,’ she pursued, ‘it may pay to leave your husband for ever alone with Isabel. I can’t say. It wouldn’t pay with any other man or any other woman. But, of course, your husband may be an exception. Most husbands are—to their wives—until the catastrophe. Now, if I were you, I should want to know a great deal more about that night they got lost on the hill together—or said they did. That sort of thing isn’t done, you know. It wants a good deal of explaining.’
Confronted with the final insult, all Gundred’s pride, the best side of her courage rallied to her aid. Her manner betrayed no agitation, paid Mrs. Mimburn no compliment of excitement. Perfectly cool and level was her voice as she looked up and answered:
‘You seem to forget that we are not living in one of that dreadful man’s plays,’ she said. ‘I should despise myself if ever I were capable of having such thoughts of my husband or my cousin. As you said just now, such things are not done—in the class I know, at all events.’ She fixed a cool, contemptuous, grey stare on the astounded Minne-Adélaïde, who suddenly had an unaccustomed feeling of getting the worst of it.
Fluttered by this sudden revolt, Mrs. Mimburn made an effort to recover lost ground.
‘I am sorry you take it like that,’ she began. ‘Of course one does not mean to accuse——’