“Oh, is that all? All right. I’m off to bed this minute,” he said, strangling a yawn.
“I don’t mean that. I mean … I’d rather not sail with you tomorrow.”
“Not sail?” He swung round and mustered her incredulously. “What in God’s name are you driving at now?”
“Just what I say. I’d rather not go. …”
He leaned in the doorway, waiting. She said nothing more, and he broke into the thin laugh which often preceded his outbursts of anger. “May I ask what all the fuss is about anyhow?”
She gave back his look almost timidly. She had not known she meant to say just those words till they were uttered; but now she knew it was her inmost self which had said them, and she could not take back what was spoken. Yet how was she to explain? “Because I … because I feel I want to be alone for a while. …”
“That’s why you’re not going?”
“I don’t feel as if—I could. …”
“You’re not serious, are you?”
“Yes. I’m serious.”
There was another silence. She saw that he was baffled and mortified, and yet too proud to argue with her or entreat her.
“Oh, all right—if you say so,” he muttered. Then, after a pause: “All the same, though, I’m curious to know why.”
She hesitated, still caught in the hopeless difficulty of finding words. “It’s because … I suddenly see that we feel too differently about things, and I want to have time to think … to go away and think by myself. …”
Tarrant’s lips narrowed, and his cold eyes seemed to draw closer together. “If you mean that we feel differently about lending Vance Weston money, we certainly do. I rather wonder, though, that you should pick that out as a grievance. I should have thought you might have remembered that as a rule I’m not backward about lending money.”
There was a long pause. Halo leaned against the chair from which she had risen, and the eyes resting on her husband filled with tears. Her resentment had died at the very moment when he had found the taunt most calculated to quicken it. She would have given the world if he had not said those particular words, because they laid bare to her the corner of his mind where old grudges and rancours were stored, the corner into which she had always refused to look. But now that the words were spoken she felt only pity for him—and for herself. It seemed to her that he and she merited equally such humiliation as the moment involved. “Oh, Lewis,” she began, “please don’t. …”
“I don’t want to—all I want is to make myself clear.”
“You have,” she murmured. She straightened herself and took a step back. He still leaned in the door and looked at her.
“All right,” he said, again with his thin laugh. “Then we may call the matter settled?”
She made no answer, and after waiting a moment he went out of the room. When the door had closed she sat down and leaned back in her chair with closed eyes.
To justify her appearance at Eaglewood on the day when she was supposed to be sailing with her husband, Halo told her parents that at the last minute she had decided he would do his job better without her. Dragging a wife about on such a hurried expedition—what a nuisance! Of course he couldn’t tell her so; but his beautifully simulated distress, when she had announced her decision, had shown her how relieved he felt. “You know how he is: never so polite as when he wishes you were dead and buried,” she reminded her father and mother; and smilingly watched their incredulity melt into reassurance. It was easy now to reassure the Spears! Since their own wants were provided for they had grown less exacting for others. With a comforting word or two you could put Mr. Spear’s mind to rest about the treatment of live bait, or Mrs. Spear’s about the future of democracy. And so with the case of their daughter. Mrs. Spear, who still needed to be told at intervals that all was right with the world, instantly seized on the idea that Halo had given up sailing because she had “hopes” again—at last!—had perhaps been advised by the doctor … though the poor child, after her previous disappointments, was naturally reticent. And Mr. Spear smoked his good cigars, and said, well, no doubt his daughter knew her business better than they did, and he rather admired the way the modern young people had of respecting each other’s independence. Halo knew that her parents were enchanted to have her to themselves; Tarrant rather intimidated them, and it was easier to praise him behind his back than to humour him to his face. The easy happy-go-lucky quarrelsome atmosphere of Eaglewood was always chilled by his presence; and there were so many of their friends whom he regarded as bores or cranks, and whom they couldn’t invite when he was there. …
Halo did not care what her parents thought of her sham reasons, as long as they feigned to accept them; she was too busy examining the real ones. She knew that she had at last emerged into the bald light of day from the mist of illusion she had tried to create about her marriage. That talk with Lewis had been a turning point: the inevitable stocktaking. Never again would she see him save as he was; but she would also, as inevitably, see herself as chained to him for life.
The fact that he had reminded her of her obligation would make it perpetually present to her. The new carpets at Eaglewood, the Spear flat in New York, Mrs. Spear’s black velvet, Mr. Spear’s cigars, the funds for Lorry’s theatrical enterprise—these were the links of her chain. They held her as tight as if divorce had never existed. For she knew now that all Lewis’s generosity (yes, yes, he was generous!) had proceeded not from the
