“The bedroom being mine, perhaps you will permit me to remind you that you possess one of your own, and that it is nearly one o’clock!�
It was, in fact, a quarter-past twelve. But the door closed behind Him with such a terrific bang that the thready little utterance of the silver timepiece was completely unnoticed.
She put her hand to her throat, as a leading actress invariably does in moments of great mental stress, and uttered a choking little laugh of sorrow and bitterness. Men were really like this, then! Fool, oh, fool, to doubt! Had she not read, had she not seen, had not other women whispered?... And had her mother not plainly told her that this man—now her husband!—was more like other men than any of the other men resembled others? She sobbed a few sobs, dried her eyes, and prepared for bed. But when arrayed in white samite, mystic and wonderful, with the traces of tears effaced by perfumed hot water, the pinkness of nose and eyelids ameliorated by a dab or two of powder, the gold-brown tresses He had once sonneted, and now sneered at, brushed out and beautiful, she took up the double basket owned by Sada Yacco and Abé San, placed it in the boudoir, returned for the canine couple, deposited them inside it, and then, resolutely shutting the door of communication upon their astonished countenances, got into bed, cast one indifferent glance at the twin couch adjoining, shrugged her shoulders, and switched off the light.
“S’n’ff!�
That was Abé San snuffing inquiringly at the bottom of the door. Sada Yacco joined him, and they snuffed together. It was impossible to sleep, especially when they began to discuss the situation in whimpers and short yelps. Then they began to race round the boudoir, barking in whimpers. Then, just as She had made up her mind to buy peace by letting them in, there was a sharp bark from Sada Yacco, a joyous scrape at a distant door, and a rattling of claws as the couple, emancipated from vile durance in the boudoir, joyously galloped down the passage. Then sleep soporifically stole over the senses of a wronged and brutally injured woman. It was not chilly, sloppy December: it was radiant July. She was not in a London flat. She was in a well-known back-water above Goring-on-Thames, cosy in a red-curtained punt, with a Japanese umbrella and two Japanese pugs and a husband, very handsome, almost quite new, madly devoted, not the quite plain, absolutely sulky, unspeakably disagreeable He now conjecturally snoring on the opposite side of the passage. And so She slept and dreamed.
He was not asleep. Propped up in his own beautiful little bed in his own cosy dressing-room, he was smoking a long cigar, and, as a further demonstration of bachelor independence, a brandy and Apollinaris stood untouched beside him. By the electric light dangling over his head, where sardonically hung suspended a wooden Cupid—ha, ha!—he was perusing a book. She objected to reading in bed, that was why—ha, ha! again. The thin-paper volume, supposed to be an enlightening work on Oval Billiards, proved, by a tricky freak of Fate, to be an English translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is what he read:
“Calm is the bottom of my sea:
Who would divine that it hideth droll monsters?
Unmoved is my depth, yet it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters.
An imposing One saw I to-day—a solemn One, a penitent of the Spirit....