Poor Teddy flew off in disgust,
Saying, ‘Marry a Marquis if you must.’”
Lynette clapped her hands.
“What a horrid Miss Bruin! I hope she died an old maid!”
“No, she married Lord Grizzley. And he gave her twopence a week to dress on, and made her give him her fur to stuff his bath-chair cushions with.”
“How splendid! That’s just what ought to have happened, daddy.”
When he had kissed her “good night,” and seen her snuggle down with her hair spread out over the pillow, Canterton went down to the library and, in passing the door of the drawing-room, heard Mrs. Brocklebank’s voice sending out its slow, complacent notes. This woman always had a curious psychical effect on him. She smeared all the fine outlines of life, and brought an unpleasant odour into the house that penetrated everywhere. What was more, she had the effect of making him look at his wife with that merciless candour that discovers every crudity, and every trifle that is unlovely. Gertrude was a most excellent woman. He saw her high forehead, her hat tilted at the wrong angle, her hair straggling in wisps, her finnicking vivacity, her thin, wriggling shoulders, the way she mouthed her words and poked her chin forward when she talked. The clarity of his vision often shocked him, especially when he tried to remember her as a slim and rather over-enthusiastic girl. Had they both changed so vastly, and why? He knew that his wife had become subtly repulsive to him, not in the mere gross physical sense alone, but in her mental odour. They ate together, but slept apart. He never entered her room. The idea of touching her provoked some fastidious instinct within him, and made him shrink from the imagined contact.
Sometimes he wondered whether Gertrude was aware of this strong and incipient repulsion. He imagined that she felt nothing. He had not lived with her for fifteen years without discovering how thick was the skin of her restless egotism. Canterton had never known anyone who was so completely and actively self-satisfied. He never remembered having seen her in tears. As for their estrangement, it had come about gradually when he had chosen to change the life of the amateur for the life of the trader. Then there was the child, another gulf between them. A tacit yet silent antagonism had grown up round Lynette.
On Canterton’s desk in the library lay the manuscript of his “Book of the English Garden.” He had been at work on it for two years, trying to get all the mystery and colour and beauty of growth into the words he used.
He sat down at the desk, and turned over the pages written in that strong, regular, and unhurried hand of his. The manuscript smelt of lavender, for he always kept a few sprigs between the leaves. But to-night something seemed lacking in the book. It was too much a thing of black and white. The words did not strike upon his brain and evoke a glow of living colour. Roses were not red enough, and the torch lily had not a sufficient flame.