“But you have changed your opinion of marriage—of the essentials of marriage?”
“Do YOU need to ask that? I was beginning to see the light—beginning to know myself—even before I married him, but I didn’t stop to analyze. I plunged ahead, as I have always done, trusting not to get into any position from which I could not find a way out. But there are some positions from which there is no way out.”
Grant reflected that possibly his experience had been somewhat like hers in that respect. He, too, had been following a path, unconcerned about its end.... Possibly for him, too, there would be no way out.
“Frank has been all I expected of him,” she repeated, as though anxious to do her husband justice. “He has made money. He spends it generously. If I live here modestly, with but one maid, it is because of a preference which I have developed for simplicity. I might have a dozen if I asked it, and I think Frank is somewhat surprised, and, it may be, disappointed, that I don’t ask it. Although not a man for display himself, he likes to see me make display. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, that a husband should wish his wife to be admired by other men?”
“Some are successful in that,” Grant remarked.
“Some are more successful than they intend to be.”
“Frank, for instance?” he queried, pointedly.
“I have not sought any man’s admiration,” she went on, with her astonishing frankness. “I am too independent for that. What do I care for their admiration? But every woman wants love.”
Grant had changed his position, and sat with his elbows upon his knees, his chin resting upon his hands. “You know, Zen,” he said, using her Christian name deliberately, “the picture I drew that day by the river? That is the picture I have carried in my mind ever since—shall carry to the end. Perhaps it has led me to be imprudent—”
“Imprudent?”