“That may be,” said his wife, sadly, “but it cannot put us back in our old places.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it necessary to explain what is so clear? This affair has changed my attitude toward you entirely. It has killed my confidence in your honesty, and revealed your character to me in a new light. I can never be the same to you as before.”
Thoroughly frightened he began to cast about for bigger straws to catch at. His wife took on new value in his eyes. An hour or so before he had commiserated himself for being tied to her, and had wondered why a being so superior as he had ever been attracted to one so ordinary as she. Now he wanted to keep her at all costs. He was one to whom blessings brightened astonishingly as they took their flight.
“You don’t mean to say you would leave me for a trifle like that, Cartice? It would be ridiculous. Everybody would laugh at you. Why, that little episode is nothing. You should know some of the really reprehensible things married men do and think nothing of it. Men don’t bother much about loyalty and the finer moralities, I assure you. They’re good enough for women, but men can’t walk that kind of a line, you know. Your ideas are too depressingly antique for the age you live in.”
“What men do and what other women accept cannot change my idea of what constitutes marriage. I will not be a party to a contract kept only by one of the two interested. I have seen women whose husbands violated every canon of decency going on patiently, under the delusion that they were doing a virtuous thing. To my mind they were encouraging vice. Kisses represent feelings. One kisses because one loves. I could not kiss a man I did not love because it would be repulsive. One is loyal, not because of a sense of duty, but because one loves; or disloyal because one has ceased to love.”
“Anyway, Cartice, don’t leave me or talk about leaving me. You are all I have in the world. Forgive me, and love me if you can. I feel mean enough without your contempt.” As he said this, Doring flung himself on the floor clasping her in his arms and began to weep.
“He does not understand; he never will understand—he cannot. He thinks it is something to be forgiven and then to go on as before,” she said, mentally.
Anyhow she went on, but not as before. In that hour her love for her husband had changed its form and face. It had become maternal. All hope that they could make the journey of life as companions on an equal footing was dead.
No more painful experience can come to a proud woman than that of seeing that the man she has idealized must be propped up instead of leaned against.