Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either in their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands than in St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of upholstered furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox on his tongue and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while Doria, chin on palm, and her great eyes set on him, drank in all the wonder of this miraculous being.
I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the man."
Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of view. . . .
"I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking. When she has turned him into the idiot—"
"She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted.
"But when she finds out the idiot she has made?"
"No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I. "The unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole consistency."
Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but found none, the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a while and then, quickly, a smile replaced the frown.
"I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she said sweetly.
I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates of a torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she vanished from the apartment. She did. The old-fashioned high-falutin' phrase is the best description I can give of the elusive uncapturable nature of this wife of mine. It is a pity that she has so little to do with the story of Jaffery which I am trying to relate, for I should like to make her the heroine. You see, I know her so well, or imagine I do, which comes to the same thing, and I should love to present you with a solution, of this perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled conundrum that is Barbara Freeth. But she, like myself, is but a raisonneur in the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the background. Paullo majora canamus. Let us come to the horses.