Mortimer was drunk—he often was; it was the least heinous of his crimes. She went upstairs crying, and went to bed, but she knew she could not sleep that night, and yet she took no bromide or sulphonal. She wanted to think—she meant to think things out—so she lay, and thought, and thought, with extreme intensity and vigour, if with little coherence. So intent was she that she lay quite straight out and still, and did not toss, while the trains of thought succeeded each other with extraordinary rapidity. The tall clock on the stairs outside her door ticked loudly and monotonously, and the whole problem of her life arrayed itself and measured out its phases to the beat of the pendulum, which seemed to balance them, as it were.
Mortimer was impossible! He had always been impossible! His conduct this evening was of a piece with his whole conduct to her, ever since a few weeks after marriage. Halcyon weeks, which every woman has a right to expect, while they in no wise concern or affect the life that follows after. His taunt about the circumstances of her marriage to him she dismissed, she knew quite well that she had provoked him to it, he had not meant it, there was no foundation for it. He had wooed and won her in the usual, commonplace way, been timid and attentive, and had begged her for locks of her hair. And she had been complaisant and loving, and had treasured his photograph and made excuses for its ugliness, just like any other foolish girl with her first sweetheart.
Why had she done all this? Why had she bought that rose-coloured satin dress last Christmas, that she had taken such a dislike to, since, that she had only worn it twice? Her marriage was a very nearly parallel case, only she had been able to afford to throw aside the one bad bargain, and she had been obliged to abide by the other.
“Yes, I can’t say I did not know my own mind, such as it was, when I took Mortimer, but, unfortunately, it isn’t the same mind that I have now. It was a child’s mind. The whole fabric of our bodies alters every seven years, they say—well, that means our minds, too—body and soul are one in my creed. It was not this me that was glad to marry Mortimer, as he so politely put it—” she laughed bitterly. “It was another me, who had not read Ibsen.” She laughed again. “Books alter one—reading alters one—life alters one, after all! I married Mortimer like a blind puppy, not knowing, not seeing. I am nothing wonderful, but I do think I am too good for him! Why did I not see it then? Why is a girl such a fool? Why does nobody tell her? It is very hard. They say, as one has made one’s bed, so one must lie on it.... But suppose I decline to lie on it?”
She almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this crude presentment of a new idea. Then she rose, lit a candle and walked out of her room, and across a landing, and straight into Mortimer’s room. She softly approached the bed on which he lay, and, like Psyche over again, held the light up on high, and looked critically down upon her sleeping husband.
She felt an indefinable pleasure in thus surveying him helpless who was technically her master. This coarse, clumsy-fibred creature who had yet his full complement of the shrewdness and acuteness that gave him dominion over his fellow-men, and made him known as a “tough customer” in business, slept the sleep—well, if not precisely that of the just, at any rate that of the man whose balance at his bank is secure and his investment sound. He slept like a savage who has laid aside his clubs, and enjoys the dreamless, primitive sleep that he has earned by his feats of arms. His thick, broad eyelids rested peacefully on the cold, blue eyes whose empty glare his wife knew and detested. His lips were closed on his cruel little teeth in a firm, inexpressive line, pacific and meaningless, and his clumsy hands, with their short, square-nailed finger tips, lay palm outwards on the coverlet, as innocently as a child’s.
She might stare at him as long as she pleased, with those burning, insistent eyes of hers, and not fear to break his sleep; his simple nervous system would surely withstand the hypnotism of her enquiring gaze.
But next morning, he would be “all there” as usual; the hectoring, bantering, exacerbating personality would re-assert itself, and make its hundred and one demands on her self-control all through the day, till sometimes it seemed as if she could not look at him or hear his voice without screaming.
“Why should I bear it? Why should I?” she asked herself, passionately, aloud; and the pettish exclamation was significant of the great revulsion that was taking place in her, a result of the passionate, elucidating fortnight she had passed.
She went back to her room and lay down again, but she closed her eyes no more that night, and by the time the pallid dawn of Newcastle had begun to filter through the window curtains, a whole plan of action had shaped itself in her mind. She came down punctually to the eight o’clock breakfast which was exacted by Mortimer and which he had never allowed her to forego, putting some constraint on herself to appear perfectly composed, for her heart was beating violently, and she felt the suspicious flush mounting to her cheek, which had so often given unkind friends occasion to say that she painted. But Mrs. Poynder, who was presiding over the tea and coffee, looked her over with some approval.