“Dress if you like, but don’t bother me!”
“Oh, I do wonder what you married me for, Mortimer?” she complained with plaintive savageness.
“I do wish you wouldn’t talk nonsense!” he answered. “What has marriage to do with dressing for dinner?”
“Perhaps more than you think,” she murmured still in a low key, as she walked past him and opened the door. She crossed the hall slowly, like a somnambulist. It was true the conversation of Egidia and of the poet, who was no fool, and who had been brought out by the tact of the London woman, had set her thinking, and her mind travelling in a new direction. She trod on her gown going upstairs, and picked it up with the tragically careless gesture of a Joan of Arc going to the stake. She made herself the effect of a prisoner in a strange land—an alien princess in the hands of the Saracens—the Lady of “Comus” among the rabble rout. She was a delicate piece of porcelain among rough earthenware pots—a harp played upon by unknowing boors. She muttered to herself phrases of philosophy and resignation that she did not feel—her whole soul was in revolt against the conditions of her life.
“Oh, it is all so ugly!” she murmured.
She paused on the landing and looked down. Charles, her step-son, had just come in and hung up his hat and clattered down every other hat in the hall.
“Hallo, Mater!” he shouted up, “don’t commit suicide over the banisters and make a mess! Hurry up and get ready for dinner!”
“I am glad I did not have a child,” she said to herself. “He might have been half like that!”
She dressed for dinner, in a very handsome, vaporous tea-gown, drank a little sal-volatile, read a couple of verses of Omar Khayam, and sailed into the dining-room, determined to be resigned, pathetic and amiable. Her husband’s untidy, baggy shooting jacket, and Charles’s abominable “blazer,” gave her the usual jar, while Mrs. Poynder’s cheap white lace tippet with pink ribbons was only another item in the general tale of the inappropriateness and disgust. She pouted, and dropped gracefully into her accustomed seat, looking like a piece of thistledown suddenly lighted on the dull leather-covered mahogany chair.
The mild, provincial dinner proceeded. “What’s this?” asked Mortimer, when a dish came round to him. “Put it on the table, can’t you?”