CHAPTER II
“But then, you know, I have never seen your husband,” Egidia was saying to the pretty little woman who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a very easy chair, her feet upheld to the glow of a North-country fire blazing away in the very height of summer, as usual, was expatiating in the sweetest of voices on her matrimonial unhappiness. She was telling Egidia all the truth, or thought she was, and the novelist, in her double capacity of friend and gatherer of welcome “copy,” was listening sympathetically from her sofa.
It was a charming house in the suburbs of Newcastle, the abode of charming people, where Egidia was staying, and Mrs. Elles deeply appreciated the friendship with the fashionable lecturer, which had gained her the entry into this home of modernity and culture.
“Yes, if you once saw Mortimer,” Mrs. Elles went on, “you would understand all!”
The way she uttered the last word would not have disgraced a tragic actress.
“I want you to come and dine—will you? What day shall it be? Tell me, and I’ll fix it. Then you will see him, and judge for yourself.”
“My dear,” said the novelist, slowly, “I will come to your dinner with pleasure, but I shall not know any more than you have told me.”
“Yes; I have been very, very frank,” said Mrs. Elles. “And there is another thing”—she sighed vaguely. She was alluding to her husband’s habit of tippling, to which as a loyal wife she forbore from a more direct allusion.
“As a general rule,” Egidia went on, a little didactically, in her capacity of mentor, “no husband understands any wife. If he did, he wouldn’t have cared to marry her. It is the mutual antagonism between the sexes which makes them interesting to each other in the beginning. But, afterwards—if they are unable to play the game—exciting enough, I should think—of observing, of adjusting, of utilizing their mutual divergences of character and getting amusement out of them—if she finds no pleasure in the exercise of tact, if he none in the further analysis of the feminine vagaries that he began by finding so charming—then, they begin to jar mutually on each other, and turn that into tragedy which should be the comedy of life for both of them.”
“I understand,” said Mrs. Elles, humbly; “but then—there is not, and could not be, any comedy of life with Mortimer, or tragedy either! There never was. I don’t seem to care to appreciate his character, I know it—it is quite simple—I see it all spread out before me like a map—of a country I don’t care to travel over.”