Then she had married him in the delirium of self-immolation, only to find that his passionate idealism for the future was transmuted into a white-hot zest to perfect the present. He was prepared to practise the Sermon on the Mount in a tweed suit and soft hat. For a month she shared his life as she would have partaken of an impromptu mid-night picnic in the Green Park. Then a homing instinct had rebelled against the promiscuous publicity of their life, she had felt that his love for her was diluted beyond taste by a vague devotion to mankind. She had treasured slights where no slights were intended and vented irritabilities where none was justified. His smiling patience had evoked a sense of hopelessness, followed by a desire for self-assertion. They had quarrelled, and, rather than admit herself in the wrong, she had blindly groped for evidence against him which the heat of inconvertible resentment would torture her into believing. Grayle had supplied it....
She told me unreservedly of the conflicting influences upon her of three men at the same time. All were in love with her after their kind. O'Rane himself, most sympathetic with men and least understanding of women, gave her the keys and cheque-book of his life, imagining that undemonstrative, uncaressing fidelity would meet with like return; Beresford offered a romantic devotion which posed her frigidly among mountain snows and would have sent him through fire to avenge an insult to his idealised conception. And Grayle had strode in, compelling and indifferent, slighting and frightening her alternately, at a time when she was instinctively yearning to be called to order, taken in hand, shaken and even beaten.
"I was like the 'Punch' picture of the woman in a thunderstorm," she laughed. "I wanted a man there just to tell me not to make a fool of myself. Poor David never, never ..."
Grayle desired her until she felt safe in playing with him, then he neglected her until in pique she set out to try the temper of her charms; ultimately he terrorised her into a surrender which neither blind trust nor deaf devotion could compass.
She told me of her mood when she felt that Grayle was overpowering her, of her drunken willingness to believe what she knew was untrue. She described her parting with O'Rane as she might have described herself beating a child because she was out of temper and had to pretend that someone else was in fault. I was given an unsparing account of her life in Milford Square, which she entered with an unsubstantial hope that she would find love and a quivering sense that she had come like a dog to be beaten. Not a day and night had passed before she found that she had outstayed her welcome, that she was pressing on him for all his life what he desired for an unoccupied afternoon. Their life together was like the record of wife-beating by a besotted husband refined in method by the play of sarcastic wit on impressionable senses. At last there had come a day when he put into words the taunt that hitherto lacked only verbal clarity; she riposted with the charge that he was discarding her to clear the way to his political ambitions; every hoarded grudge and bitterness was dragged into the light, unseemly reproaches were uttered with the knowledge that all were exaggerated and most without foundation; and in a breathing-space both discovered that the articulation of such hidden and reserved acerbity made it impossible for them ever to live together again.
She had walked into the street with his last scurrility stinging her ears and cheeks until she found herself tearlessly crying. It was no use crying, when she needed all her wits to decide her next move, all her composure to face it. A lodging for the night had to be found in some place where she would not be interrogated, and for long her mind wavered slowly from one to another of the neighbourhoods in which she had lived and which all the while she knew were the first for her to reject—Rutland Gate, Manchester Square, Curzon Street, Westminster. It was hard to think of anywhere else; one needed a map, one of those easy maps that were pasted on the walls of Underground stations....
The long recital had exhausted her pent antagonism, and she described her experiences as General Lampwood's driver with humour and an occasional preening of her feathers.
"One day I knew I was going to have a child," she threw out abruptly. "It—it made me quite ill. Then—well, you know the rest. I'm not complaining. I never thought it was going to be easy or pleasant, but, if I had my time over again——"
"I think not, Sonia," I said.