There was no change in her; and I was driven to issue my ultimatum:
“If you’d like me to go away again, I will. And this time I shouldn’t upset you by coming back. I’ve done my best; and I’ve failed. We can part friends. If you want a divorce, you can have it now.”. . .
“Somehow, I don’t see you in the divorce-court,” Barbara murmured half to herself. “I feel you’d bungle it. When I wrote and begged you to come back, you would . . . by special train.”
“Well, the matter is now in your hands,” I said.
“I think you’ve a finer collection of worn-out phrases than any man I know,” she cried, again without answering my question.
5
“No change of any kind!,” I told my cousin Violet when we dined with her a fortnight after my return to England.
Barbara had not mentioned divorce again; and I believe we were summoned to Loring House with a view to mending the latest breach between Sonia and her husband. He, unchanging in stubbornness, had published the article which I rejected and was threatening to follow it with others; Sonia, unchanging in tactics, had announced that she would walk out of the house unless he yielded. Bertrand, unchanging in the beloved formula which he applied indiscriminately to cigarette-smoking, Christianity, vers libre, welfare-work, side-whiskers and “self-determination”, explained that this was only a phase, which one or other or both would outgrow. And Violet, whose kindness of heart nothing could change, was playing counsellor and friend of all parties.
“We, I suppose,” said Barbara, “are to be the object-lesson in domestic felicity. When women have married the wrong men, as Sonia and I did, it’s rather a waste of time for any one to patch it up.”
“If there’s been a fair trial,” I said, “you should end what you can’t mend. Armed neutrality is intolerable.”