“What is her motive?”
“That’s not so easy to explain. It’s a pity you haven’t the data for comprehending her, Easton, and enjoying her character; you don’t know other women, and you can’t see how sublimely perfect Mrs. Farrell is in her way. She’s one of the most beautiful women I ever saw; one of the brightest, the most amiable. But I should be sorry to marry her; I shouldn’t want my wife so amiable—to everybody. She isn’t meant for the domesticities. There’s no harm in her; she simply wants excitement, luxury, applause, all in one, all the time. By Jove! the man that gets her will wish she was his widow, and so will she, as soon as she has him. She’s an inspired flirt; and I don’t mean that she’s like young girls who can’t help their innocent coquetries with a man or two; but her flirtatiousness is vast enough for the whole world, and enduring enough for all time. As long as she lives she’ll be wanting to try her power upon some one; and there can’t be any game so high or so low that she won’t fly at it. What a life that would be for her husband!”
Easton sat still while Gilbert spoke, and he remained silent when he ceased. But the words had given him a supreme satisfaction; they had lifted a load from his heart; they had made the way clear and straight. He was infinitely far from resenting what left her, as concerned Gilbert at least, so solely to his love and worship. With his passion their reason or unreason had not a feather’s weight.
“Shall you stay any longer than the end of the fortnight?” he asked at last.
“No,” said Gilbert, who was used to Easton’s way of suddenly turning from the matter of their talk, and coming as suddenly back to it some other time; “I don’t think I could stand it longer.”
Easton made a motion to replace his cigar in his lips, then looked at it with sudden disgust and flung it over the rail. His mind ran off in wild reverie upon the kiss, which he now feigned again and again upon her hand. His eccentric life and his peculiar temperament had kept him so unlike other young men that he had no trouble for the violated conventionality; it could only be a question of right or wrong with him; he believed that he had taken an unfair advantage of her attempt at reparation, but the fire that burned in his heart seemed to purge it of whatever wrong there was in his violence. He was reclining there near her on the rock under the hovering shade, with the bracken in light undulation all around above their heads, and the summer at its sweetest in the air and earth; then he despaired to think that the night must pass before he could see her again, that life itself might pass and no such moment come again. His reverie broke in a long, deep sigh.
Gilbert gave a sudden laugh. “Why, I believe, Easton, you are hit! You had forgotten I was here,” he continued, as Easton looked round in a stupefied way. “Well, I’ll leave you to your raptures.”
“I’m going to bed, too,” said Easton. “I’m tired to death;” and he rose from his chair with a leaden sense of fatigue in every fiber.
Their rooms opened into each other, and Easton was abed when Gilbert rapped on the dividing door. “Come in,” he called.
Gilbert came into the room, which the bright moon would have made uncomfortable for any but a lover. “Look here, old fellow,” he said, bending over his friend, with one arm stretched along the headboard, “you didn’t think to-day, from anything my sister-in-law said, that I’d been making light of you, did you?”