Her tone made him a little uneasy, though not so much so as if she had been any one else, since he knew her habit of viewing all life—even its slightnesses—from a serious standpoint.
“Whatever it is, let us at least face it under as comfortable conditions as we can,” he answered with a resigned smile, wheeling the austerest of his armchairs, and the one therefore best suited to her liking, nearer the fire for her.
He was surprised at not receiving a rebuke for the luxuriousness and self-indulgence of the sentiment, but she only assented mildly—
“Yes, if you do not mind, I will sit down, as what I have to say must take a certain amount of time.”
There was a pause. Camilla had laid aside her spectacles—a sign of good augury in her husband’s experience for her amiability; and now sat with her gaze abstractedly fixed on the old sporting and coaching coloured prints, which the eyes of her ugly solemn childhood had contemplated. He waited with an air of patient deference. Once, long ago, an ill-natured remark had reached his ears to the effect that his manner to his wife was charmingly filial, and though the jeer had cut him to the quick, he had made no consequent change in it.
In a few minutes Camilla had apparently collected and marshalled her ideas, and began to speak. The opening took him by surprise.
“I do not think that I have ever been open to the charge of being a malade imaginaire.”
There was a startled touch in his answer. “I think you have often been a bien portante imaginaire, and overworked yourself grossly in consequence.”
“I have not felt in quite my usual health for the last three months. At first I attached no importance to the fact, recognizing that at fifty-one cannot expect to have the vigour of twenty-five.” The appearance in conversation of the grand climacteric was always, as they both knew, a bugbear to Edward; but for once he recognized that there was no intention of galling him in its introduction. “But of late”—she paused, as if to choose the words best fitted for a weighty communication; then went on steadily—“I have had reason to suspect that something further must be wrong with me than the failure of power attendant upon the approach of age.”
At another moment he would have reproached her with a phrasing that might have better befitted her had twenty more years been added to the detestable fifty, which were always being thrown in his teeth, but now a painful suspense as to what was coming kept him dumb.