“Will you tell me your reasons, Thornton?” asked Clytie.
He crumpled up his paper angrily and thumped it on the table. The veins in his forehead stood out. His face grew ugly.
“When I say a thing is to be done I mean it,” he cried, “and I am not accustomed to be asked for my reasons!”
“I shall leave you until you have recovered yourself,” said Clytie with dignity, and she left the room.
This was the first real quarrel between them. The blood had often rushed hot through Clytie's veins and set her pulses tingling, but hitherto she had restrained herself, feeling that the first revolt would mark the beginning of the end.
She passed a miserable day. When Thornton came home in the afternoon to dress for dinner he was in one of his light-hearted moods. He had backed an outsider some weeks back at very long odds. The race had been run that day and the outsider had won, bringing him a couple of thousand pounds—a windfall that relieved him of certain temporary embarrassments. Hence his buoyancy that afternoon. He had apparently forgotten the morning's difference, and called Clytie “little wife” again, and promised her a victoria to supplement the modest brougham with which they had begun. He put his arm round her and kissed her, praised her beautiful hair, the roundness of her arms, her dress. He told her the gossip of the day in his bright off-hand manner, made her laugh in spite of her weariness. But when he kissed her she shrank a little. In the elation of his victory he did not notice her lack of responsiveness; besides, he was not over-sensitive at any time. When they returned home at night from the dinner-party to which they had gone together, Thornton was still in pleasant mood. Nothing more was said respecting the plans for August and September.
The reconciliation did not last long. Clytie strove with an earnestness that was torture to keep the peace between them, but sometimes her nature clamoured within her and broke out in self-assertion. Only four months married, and already the breach between them was perceptible, slowly widening. And it was Clytie that drifted away from her husband. If she had been a lesser nature, she might have retained the love on both sides. A woman of a lower type would have been able to flatter, soothe, cajole, yield, and thus have kept Thornton at her feet. The patronising contempt for her own needs, which lashed Clytie to the soul, she would have treated lightly, as the natural and foolish vanity of the superior being; and she would have found in a sudden demonstration of passion full compensation for previous indifference. But Clytie was not only unversed herself in the arts of seduction, but despised them fiercely in other women. And she began also to dread Thornton's fits of affection as much as his fits of anger.
He left her one morning quivering with mortification and suppressed bitterness. He himself was not conscious of the slight he had inflicted, and he went away in gay spirits. Their talk had turned upon a Cabinet Minister named Godderich, whose influence Thornton was anxious to acquire. Now it had so happened that this same Godderich had succeeded in making himself vastly obnoxious to Clytie. She told her husband this, giving him the reasons.
“I have not been accustomed to that kind of admiration,” she said, “and I don't like it.”
But Thornton laughed his great laugh, called her “his unconventional prude,” and went on to show her what an invaluable ally Godderich was.