“No, by Jove, not quite! Let me see, you were nineteen when I married you—we have been married ten years—that makes you out—?”
“You needn’t trouble to go on,” she replied haughtily, “I can’t say that the subject interests me—one only counts birthdays when one is happy.”
She escaped to her room, tore off the gauzy tea gown, and put on a black one which she reserved for occasions like this, when the mood of gloom preponderated. It was a little affectation of hers to dress as far as possible in character with her mood of the moment.
Yes, she was very wretched—had been for the last ten years. She wondered how she had borne it so long, and if she could go on bearing it. The time had surely come for her to do something—what? She would go, to-morrow, and call on Egidia in the big house where she was staying at Jesmond Dene, and talk it all over with her. Egidia, being a professed searcher into the secrets of the heart, would be able to understand, and perhaps offer some solution of her dreadful predicament. She might even take a professional interest in it. “She can put me in a novel if she likes,” Phœbe Elles said to herself, wearily, “but I must speak or I shall die!”
Die of dullness, die of disappointment, die of inanition, or, what was worse, lose her looks. “They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings,” she quoted, from Heaven knows what recondite Elizabethan play, “and dull the complexion,” she added on her responsibility. She always read everything more or less with reference to herself, and twisted the most impassioned utterances of poetry and the drama into apt coincidence with her own affairs.
Up till now, she had sedulously preserved the one virtue of neglected wives—she had never “peached.” She had scrupulously disdained the common vulgarity of confidences, the petty relief of expansion, and no one had ever heard her abuse her husband. She had learned to speak of him with an amused tolerance, whose undercurrent of contempt was not necessarily apparent to the merely superficial observer. It was a point of honour with her; but deep below her graceful reticence lay the point of vanity—she wanted people to think, if possible, that Mortimer, whom she had ceased to care for, was still desperately in love with her.
She had read many French novels, and she knew that, socially speaking, there was one modus vivendi to be adopted by a woman in her position. She might create for herself some outside interest—she might get up the harmless, necessary flirtation, by which women, circumstanced as she was, are apt to console themselves.
Without the remotest intention of actually pursuing it, she began to cast about in her mind for a possible coadjutor in such a course of action. She began to count heads, to consider all the eligible flirtations that Newcastle afforded, with a drear little smile at the paucity of attractions, at the inferiority of the subject material which presented itself to her mind.
The poet! He was handsome, clever, romantic; he admired her much, but only on condition that she returned his compliment and admired him more! That would not do. Besides, her present pose to him was that of a mother—a very young mother of course—and promoter of his incipient predilection for the handsome and “horsey” Miss Drummond, Atalanta-Diana as he was pleased to call her; the girl of strong physique and mannish tastes, who was the complement of his own nature. Then there was Dr. Moorsom, who lived next door—“The man whose business it would be to doctor me if I fell ill!” she sneered to herself. Everyone was supremely uninteresting—as uninteresting as Mortimer. That was the worst of it—Mortimer was odious, but then, so was everybody else.
No, better be “straight” and a martyr, than set herself, at the cost of her reputation, perhaps, to wrest from society a merely nominal happiness, and court a catastrophe that would have none of the elements of grandeur or romance about it. She would go back to her “dream-lives”—to the literary simulacra of existence which, till the epoch-making advent of the South-country novelist, had sufficed her, and had been as the mirror Perseus held up before Andromeda, affording her the harmless vision of the Gorgon’s head with the snaky horror of its looks that may stand for life and the hideous complications thereof.