"Oh, I don't want you to bother—! Only—" She was just a little taken aback. This barren agreement, this lack of natural shyness, of blushes! It was unprecedented in her experience.
"Only what, Aunt Cecilia?"
"Only—it's a sure cure for being bored. But Beatrice, there must be others, while you're waiting. What about your studies, your work? You haven't done much of that since you came home from abroad, have you? It's too late to begin anything this summer, of course, but next autumn I should think you'd like to take it up again, especially as you don't care so much for society, and I'm sure I don't blame you for that...." She beamed momentarily on her niece, who this time smiled back ever so slightly in return. "After all, it's nice to be of some use in the world, isn't it?"
Why not have left it there, on that secure impregnable pinnacle? Why weaken her position by giving voice to that silly unprovoked fancy that had hung about the back of her mind since the beginning of the interview, or very near it? We can't explain, unless the sudden suspicion that Beatrice had smiled less with than at her, and the sight of her sitting there so beautiful and aloof, so well-bredly acquiescent and so emotionally intangible, exercised an ignoble influence over her. There is a sort of silent acquiescence that is very irritating.... And after all, was the impulse so ignoble? A word of warning of the most affectionate kind, prompted by the keenest sympathy—surely it was wholly Beatrice's fault if anything went wrong!
"More than that, my dear, there's a certain danger in being too idle—a danger I'm sure you're as free from as any one could be, but you know what the psalm says!" (Or was it original with Isaac Watts? However!) "Of course marriage isn't so easy, especially in the first year, and especially if there are no children—what with the husband away at work all day and tired to death and like as not cross as a bear when he comes home in the evening—I know!—a young wife can't be blamed for feeling a little out of sorts sometimes. And then along comes another man...."
Here Beatrice, to use a sporting expression, froze. From that moment it ceased to be question of two women talking together and became a matter of Aunt Cecilia apostrophizing a statue; a modern conception, say, of Artemis. Marble itself could not be more unresponsive than Beatrice when people tried to "get at her." It was not rudeness, it was not coldness, it was not even primarily self-consciousness; it was the natural inability to speak of matters deeply concerning oneself which people of Aunt Cecilia's temperament can never fully understand.
"Of course other men have things to offer that husbands have not, especially if they are free in the daytime and are nice and good-natured and sympathetic, and often a young wife may be deceived into valuing these things more than the love of her husband. They are all at their best on the surface, while her husband's best is all below it. And that, I think, is the way most married unhappinesses begin; not in unfaithfulness or in jealousy or in loss of love, but merely in idleness. I've seen it happen so often, dear, that you must be able to understand why I never like to see a young wife with too little to do...."
For Aunt Cecilia was personal, you see, to a degree. Did she imagine she was making things any easier, Beatrice asked herself with a little burst of humorous contempt, by her generalities and her third persons and her "young wives"? If she had been perfectly frank, if she had come out and said, "Beatrice, if you don't look out you'll be falling in love with Tommy Clairloch," there was a possibility that Beatrice could have answered her, even confided in her; at least put things on a conversational footing. But as for talking about her own case in this degrading disguise, dramatizing herself as a "young wife"—!
She remained silent long enough to make it obvious that her silence was her real reply. Then she said "Yes, indeed, perfectly," and Aunt Cecilia rather tardily became aware of her niece's metamorphosis into the modern Artemis. She made a flurried attempt to give her own remarks, retrospectively, something of the Artemis quality; to place a pedestal, as it were, on which to take her own stand as a modern conception of Pallas Athene.
"I hope, my dear, you don't think I mean anything...."