“By Jove! You're looking lovelier than ever!” he cried. “Come, let me kiss you.”
He drew her to him, kissed the upper part of her arm, and then her lips. But she made no response. She shrank, and this time he noted it. His arm still round her waist, he held back his head and looked at her.
“Clytie!”
He spoke with loverlike reproach, and kissed her again, and again she shrank. And then he cast her aside roughly, and stamped his foot.
“Damn it! Clytie,” he exclaimed, showing his teeth, “you are a perfect icicle!”
Clytie made no reply, but turned to the window and buttoned her glove. Thornton rang the bell violently, and when the footman appeared asked him why the devil the carriage had not come round. Then he flung himself into a chair and turned over a book. And thus they remained without speaking until the brougham was announced. On their way to their dinner-party they did not speak. He was in a fit of furious sulks, and Clytie's heart was too heavy. Afterwards he went off to his club and she drove home by herself.
And this at the end of only four months' wedded life. What would it be at the end of four years, fourteen? Clytie strove for a little to blame herself for supersensitiveness, egotism, coldness. But her self rose in arms against this charge. For, like the unfolding of a horrible story, the nature of Thornton's love for her, the nature of the place she really occupied in his estimation, gradually broke upon her. The meaning of light remarks, trivial jests, careless actions; the meaning of caresses now half contemptuous, now passionate—all came to her in full light, in all their crudity, out of the gray darkness in which she had instinctively kept it hidden from herself. She stared at it—not in ignorant surmise as she had done in Paris, but with a ghastly sickening of soul.
Oh, the degradation of it! What was she to her husband but a possession, a toy, a woman, to suffer his caresses when it so pleased him to bestow them, a mistress whom he had taken it into his head to bind legally to himself, so that she might serve certain purposes of his in society? What little better was she to him than the women whom men buy,—Loulou Mendès, for instance,—save that he reckoned,—he had told her so,—on her fidelity to him? Things she had tried to ascribe to the careless familiarity of love blazed insultingly before her, scorching her, making her writhe in her abasement.
Naturally satiety had come to him. He was indifferent whether he saw her or not for a season. Only in his absence she was to obey blindly his caprices. If only she was his wife, she thought bitterly, in the humdrum Durdleham way, where at least she would have had the conventional position in their conjugal relations! Either that or the wild independence of a Loulou Mendès, carrying her will in her hand, free to choose her own way among the groves of the satyrs. For even there the free path smells sweeter than the one of servitude.
Just before the session ended Clytie came to a definite understanding with her husband. It is surprising what pain can underlie this mutual adjustment of two intelligences.