He made up his mind to apologise at once, and paused at her door on his way downstairs. But he heard the voice of the maid inside, and decided to wait till they were alone in the drawing-room before dinner. She was nearly always down a few minutes before eight.
However, tonight, perversely, she did not appear. The clock struck eight, and to Peter’s surprise, Weller, the parlourmaid, came into the room.
“Dinner is served, sir.”
“But your mistress isn’t down yet.”
“She has ordered her dinner to be sent up to her room, Sir.”
§ 6
Peter was not to be let off so easily as in the simplicity of his heart he had imagined. He had transgressed the laws of matrimony as Vera understood them, by refusing to say that he had never really loved Stella. He ought properly to have said that he had never really loved anyone until he met his wife, but that, Peter told himself, was nonsense in a man of his age. He told it to himself all the more vehemently because he had an uneasy feeling that a year ago he would have said what Vera wanted, that he himself would have believed she was the only woman he had really loved.
The next morning he went into her room as usual while she was having her breakfast, and they said the usual things to each other as if nothing had happened. But Peter felt awkward and ill at ease—he wanted, childishly, to “make it up,” but did not know how to get through the invisible wall she had built round herself. Also he knew that she would accept nothing less than a recantation of all that he had said yesterday—he would have to tell her that he had never loved Stella, that all that part of his life had been dreaming and self-deception. And he would not say it. With a queer obstinacy, whose roots he would not examine, he refused to deny his past, even to make the present happier and the future more secure.
“What are you doing today?” asked Vera coolly, as she stirred her coffee.
“I’m going over to an auction at Canterbury—they’re selling off some old government stuff.”