“No,” he said again and again. “What you ask is preposterous! Tomorrow when you are less tired you will see how ridiculous it is. No … I couldn’t think of such a thing!”
She made an effort to speak quietly. “Is it because you don’t want to put yourself in such a position?”
“It has nothing to do with that. Why should you want a divorce? We are well off, content, comfortable, happy. …”
She interrupted him, asking, “Are we?”
“What is it you expect, Olivia … to live always in a sort of romantic glow? We’re happier than most.”
“No,” she said slowly. “I don’t think happiness has ever meant much to you, Anson. Perhaps you’re above such things as happiness and unhappiness. Perhaps you’re more fortunate than most of us. I doubt if you have ever known happiness or unhappiness, for that matter. You’ve been uncomfortable when people annoyed you and got in your way, but … that’s all. Nothing more than that. Happiness … I mean it in the sensible way … has sometimes to do with delight in living, and I don’t think you’ve ever known that, even for a moment.”
He turned toward her saying, “I’ve been an honest, God-fearing, conscientious man, and I think you’re talking nonsense!”
“No, not for a moment. … Heaven knows I ought to know the truth of what I’ve been saying.”
Again they reached an impasse in the conversation and again they both remained silent, disturbed perhaps and uneasy in the consciousness that between them they had destroyed something which could never be restored; and yet with Olivia there was a cold, sustained sense of balance which came to her miraculously at such times. She felt, too, that she stood with her back against a wall, fighting. At last she said, “I would even let you divorce me—if that would be easier for you. I don’t mind putting myself in the wrong.”
Again he began to tremble. “Are you trying to tell me that. …”
“I’m not telling you anything. There hasn’t been anything at all … but … but I would give you grounds if you would agree.”
He turned away from her in disgust. “That is even more impossible. … A gentleman never divorces his wife.”
“Let’s leave the gentlemen out of it, Anson,” she said. “I’m weary of hearing what gentlemen do and do not do. I want you to act as yourself, as Anson Pentland, and not as you think you ought to act. Let’s be honest. You know you married me only because you had to marry someone … and I … I wasn’t actually disreputable, even, as you remind me, if my father was shanty Irish. And … let’s be just too. I married you because I was alone and frightened and wanted to escape a horrible life with Aunt Alice. … I wanted a home. That was it, wasn’t it? We are both guilty, but that doesn’t change the reality in the least. No, I fancy you practised loving me through a sense of duty. You tried it as long as you could and you hated it always. Oh, I’ve known what was going on. I’ve been learning ever since I came to Pentlands for the first time.”
He was regarding her now with a fixed expression of horrid fascination; he was perhaps even dazed at the sound of her voice, slowly, resolutely, tearing aside all the veils of pretense which had made their life possible for so long. He kept mumbling, “How can you talk this way? How can you say such things?”
Slowly, terribly, she went on and on: “We’re both guilty … and it’s been a failure, from the very start. I’ve tried to do my best and perhaps sometimes I’ve failed. I’ve tried to be a good mother … and now that Sybil is grown and Jack … is dead, I want a chance at freedom. I’m still young enough to want to live a little before it is too late.”
Between his teeth he said, “Don’t be a fool, Olivia. … You’re forty years old. …”
“You needn’t remind me of that. Tomorrow I shall be forty. I know it … bitterly. But my being forty makes no difference to you. To you it would be all the same if I were seventy. But to me it makes a difference … a great difference.” She waited a moment, and then said, “That’s the truth, Anson; and it’s the truth that interests me tonight. Let me be free, Anson. … Let me go while being free still means something.”
Perhaps if she had thrown herself at his feet in the attitude of a wretched, shameful woman, if she had made him feel strong and noble and heroic, she would have won; but it was a thing she could not do. She could only go on being coldly reasonable.
“And you would give up all this?” he was saying. “You’d leave Pentlands and all it stands for to marry this cheap Irishman … a nobody, the son perhaps of an immigrant dock-laborer.”
“He is the son of a dock-laborer,” she answered quietly. “And his mother was a housemaid. He’s told me so himself. And as to all this. … Why, Anson, it doesn’t mean anything to me … nothing at all that I can’t give up, nothing which means very much. I’m fond of your father, Anson, and I’m fond of you when you are yourself and not talking about what a gentleman would do. But I’d give it all up … everything … for the sake of this other thing.”
For a moment his lips moved silently and in agitation, as if it were impossible for him to answer things so preposterous as those his wife had just spoken. At last he was able to say, “I think you must have lost your mind, Olivia … to even think
