After a while she said, with some constraint: “You see a great deal of Armitage?”
“We console each other,” said I, with mild raillery.
“Have you been going out much?”
“I’m very busy.”
“In one of your letters— Those rare little notes of yours! You are cruelly neglectful, Godfrey— In oneof them you spoke of a week end or so on Armitage’s yacht. You and he don’t go off alone?”
“Oh, no. Some literary and artistic people usually are aboard.”
“I didn’t know you cared for that sort.”
“They’re interesting enough.”
“I suppose they’re friends of Mrs. Kirkwood’s,” pursued Edna. “She’s like her brother—affects to despise fashionable society. Their pretenses always amused me.”
“They are sincere people,” said I. “They don’t pretend. That’s why I like them.”
“I notice that Armitage belongs to every fashionable club in New York—and to some over here,” said Edna with a smile that was as shrewd as her observation. “Also, that he manages to find time to appear at the most exclusive parties during the season.”
I had observed this same peculiarity. While I refused to draw from it the inference she drew—and was undeniably justified in drawing—I had been tempted to do so. It irritated me to see her finger upon the weak spot in Armitage’s profession of freedom from snobbishness.
“And Mary Kirkwood,” pursued Edna, “she’s the same sort of fakir. Only, being a woman, she does it more deceptively than he.”
“She goes nowhere,” said I.
“But she revels in the fact that shecouldgo anywhere. So, she fooled you—did she?” Edna laughed merrily at my ill-concealed discomfiture. “But then you know so little about women.”
“I confess I’ve never seen in her the least sign of snobbishness or of interest in fashionable foolishness,” said I, with what I flatter myself was a fair attempt at the impartial air.
“That in itself ought to have opened your eyes,” said Edna. “Whenever you see anyone, dear, with no sign of a weakness that everybody in the world has, you may be sure you are seeing a fraud.”
“Becauseyouhave a weakness, dear,” said I—as pleasant and as acid as she, “you must not imagine it is universal.”
“Butyouhave that weakness, too.”
“Really?”
“Did you or did you not join the fashionable clubs Armitage put you up at?”
I had to laugh at myself.
“Are you or are you not proud of the fact that your best friend, Armitage, is a fashionable person? Would you be as proud of him if he were only welcome in middle-class houses?”
“I’m ashamed to say there’s something in that,” said I. “Not much, but something.”
“Yet you believed Mary Kirkwood!” ended Edna.
“I thought little about it,” said I. “And I still believe that she is sincere—that she has no snobbishness in her.”
“You like her?”
“So far as I know her—yes.” My answer was an attempt to meet and parry a suspicion I felt in Edna’s mind. And it was fairly successful; fairly—for no one ever yet completely dislodged a suspicion. We cannotsee into each other’s minds. We know, from what is going on in our own minds, that the human mind is capable of any vagary. Once we have applied this general principle to a specific person, once we have become definitely aware that there are in that person’s mind things of which we have no knowledge—from that time forth suspicion of them is in us, and is ready to grow, to flourish.
I had no difficulty in shifting to the subject of the marriage. “I’ll cable for my lawyer,” said I. “If anyone can beat this game, Fred Norman can.”
“Yes—send for him,” said Edna. “He is canny—and a man ofourworld.”
“I’m going back to London to-night—” I went on.
“To-night!” she exclaimed. Her eyes filled with tears. “Godfrey—is this treating us right?”
I looked at her intently. “Don’t fake with me,” said I quietly. “It isn’t necessary.”
“Whatdoyou mean?” cried she.
“I mean, I understand perfectly that you care nothing about me, except as the source of the money you need in amusing yourself. As you see in my manner, I am not wildly agitated by that fact. So far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason why we should make each other uncomfortable.”
“Whatisthe matter with you, Godfrey?” she said, with large widening eyes gazing at me. “You have changed entirely.”
“As you have,” said I, admiring her shrewdness, and afraid of it. “You’ve been educating. So have I.Mine has been slower than yours and along different lines. But it, too, has been thorough.”
She was not satisfied, though I’m confident my tone and manner betrayed nothing. Said she: “Some bad woman has been poisoning you against Margot and me.”
“As you please,” said I, too wary to be drawn into that discussion. I realized I had said entirely too much. Relying upon her intense vanity, her profound belief in her power over me, I had gone too far. “My business takes me to London to-night. I’ll probably be there until Norman arrives. Then we’ll come over.”
“Don’t you want us in London with you?” said Edna.
“You are comfortably settled here,” replied I. “Why disturb yourselves?”
She knew how to read me. She saw I was not in a dangerous mood, as she had begun to fear. She said: “Wedidintend to stay in Paris a month or six weeks. We have a charming circle of friends among the old families here. I wish you’d stop on, Godfrey. The people are attractive, and the social life is most interesting.”
“Not to me,” said I. “You forget I’m a Hooligan. Besides, you don’t need me. There’s your advantage through being young and lovely and rich. You can get plenty of men to escort you about. It’s only the old and ugly married women who really need their husbands. Well—I’ll be ready when you are forced to fall back on me. Nothing like having in reserve a faithful Dobbin.”
She looked hurt. “Howcanyou joke about sacred things,” she reproached.
I laughed her seriousness aside. “Yes, I’ll be waiting, ready to be your companion, the confidant of your rheumatism and gout, when all the others have fled. Meanwhile, my dear, I’ll have my frisk.”
“Godfrey!”
It amused me to see how bitter to her was the taste of the medicine she had been forcing upon me so self-complacently. It amused me to watch the confusion into which these new and unsuspected aspects of myself was throwing her.
Said I: “I’m glad you’re as generous toward me as I’ve been toward you. That’s why we’ve avoided the Armitage sort of smash-up.”
When I left Paris that night I’ll engage she was thinking about me as she had never thought in her whole self-centered, American-female life.