It seemed a listless world—the world inside a lighted London house, dominated by a pale butler with black side-whiskers and endless discretion. But Eustace did not feel it so. Winifred knew that beyond hope of doubt as she stole a glance at his face. He had put off the child—the buffoon—and looked for the moment a grave, dull young man, naturally at ease with all the conventions. She could not help saying to herself, as she went to her room to live with hairpins and her lady’s-maid: “I believe he hated it all!”
From that night of kite-flying Winifred felt differently towards her husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged with contempt.
And the fantasies of Eustace became more violent and more continuous as he began to note the lassitude which gradually crept into her intercourse with him. London rang with them. At one time he pretended to a strange passion for death; prayed to a skull which grinned in a shrine raised for it in his dressing-room; lay down each day in a coffin, and asked Winifred to close it and scatter earth upon the lid, that he might realize the end towards which we journey. He talked of silence, long and loudly—an irony which Winifred duly noted—sneered at the fleeting phantoms in the show of existence, called the sobbing of women, the laughter of men, sounds as arid as the whizz of a cracker let off by a child on the fifth of November.
“We should kill our feelings,” he said. “They make us absurd. Life should be a breathing calm, as death is a breathless calm.”
The calm descending upon Winifred was of the benumbing order.
Later he recoiled from this coquetting with the destroyer.
“After all,” he said, “which of us does not feel himself eternal, exempt from the penalty of the race? You don’t believe that you will ever die, Winifred?”
“I know it,” she said.
“Yes, but you don’t believe it.”
“You think knowledge less real than belief? Perhaps it is. But I, at least, hope that some day I shall die. To live on here for ever would be like staying eternally at a party. After all, when one has danced, and supped, and flirted, and wondered at the gowns, and praised the flowers, and touched the hand of one’s hostess, and swung round in a final gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all—one wants to go home.”