CHAPTER XVI
LEE went to her bedroom, and, in accord with some curious feminine sympathy of mental and material habit, immediately took off her gown and put on a wrapper. Then she sat down, and, to use her own phrase, endeavoured to take hold of herself. It was the first time that she had been alone for several days, and she had a good deal of thinking to do.
The most gifted of men are successful in analysing women up to a certain point only; when they find themselves confronted with utter unreasonableness, perversity, and erratic curvatures of temper, they solve the problem with a baby, and pass on. A woman may be in superb condition, she may be leading the most normal of lives, she may not have a care worthy of mention, and yet she may find herself in a state of nervous and rebellious antagonism to the whole scheme of creation. The women who work and exhaust their brain vitality with a certain regularity are less prone to such attacks, but the woman of leisure is liable to them at any moment. For the feminine imagination is a restless and virile quantity, and a clever woman is often its victim to an extent which no man can appreciate. That men are, on the whole, so patient with what must often confound andincense them, constitutes their chief claim to the forgiveness of many sins.
If Lee was by nature neither morbid nor hysterical, she felt that she was doing her best to overcome the deficiency. Randolph’s appearance had shattered the routine of her married life, and with it her self-control. She was aghast, and she was furious with herself. Cecil had ceased to be an ideal for whom no sacrifice was too great: he merely represented a sudden and violent change in the order of her inner life; and if his personal fascination and his incalculable advantage of a previous ten years’ sojourn in her imagination had accomplished this revolution and kept him master of the field for three additional years, the reaction to a strong and long-fostered individuality was but the more violent. What she wanted she was scarcely able to define, but she felt sure that she wanted several dozen things that she would never have as the wife of Cecil Maundrell.
She searched diligently for his faults, and was obliged to confess that they were few and would play a small part in the balancing of accounts. He was, if exacting, the kindest of husbands; if not amusing, he was always interesting; although moody, he showed no sign of ceasing to be a lover; if devoted to sport, she had never, in her most feminine moments, been able to persuade herself that he was not several times more devoted to her; and she had the most profound admiration for him both as a man and as an intellect. His only imperfection was that he was a strong and dominating personality with whom a woman must live as a second self or not at all; and Lee felt herselfa fool. But, unfortunately, the supreme tragedies in the lives of two people who love and are happy have often their genesis in no facts that can be analysed and disposed of.
Of one desire, Lee was acutely conscious; to get away from her husband for a time and return to California—to that stupendous country of many parts where she had been Herself, where she had stood alone, where she had munched consecutively for twenty-one years those sweets of Individuality so dear to the American soul. And, this desire suddenly defined itself, she wanted to be volatile, she wanted to be free from every responsibility; she wanted, in short, to get out of the rôle of a serious factor in the life of a serious man.
And Cecil? She made no excuses for herself, attempted no self-delusion: she looked down steadily, although with eyes of horror and disgust, at those depths of selfishness peculiar to the soul of woman—more so to the souls of women of the younger civilisations. He was practically blameless, and she was meditating a punishment meet for a brute of a husband. He loved her and needed her, and she was condemning him to the acutest suffering she could devise, short of her own death. Nevertheless, if the situation were to be saved at all, she must get away from him, she must be Herself for a time—for a year. After that? Doubtless she would love him the better. Certainly she would never love any other man. Her prediction that hatred of her husband might be the result of three more uninterrupted years of him and of England had been a mere verbalexpression of nervous tension; even in the present adventurous and overworked state of her imagination she knew that she loved him, and would so long as consciousness survived in her. If she could have had that most plausible of all excuses, the death of affection and passion, she would have felt quite ready to justify herself. As it was, there were no limits to her self-abasement And, logically, there were no limits to her unreasoning anger with her husband.
She wanted her Individuality back; that was the long and the short of it.
Regarding Randolph, she felt a certain disquiet He had not betrayed himself by so much as a glance, but her woman’s instinct told her that he still loved her. There was nothing to apprehend, however, beyond a possible scene at a remote period. If he was playing a big game it was for heavy stakes, and he would not show his cards for many a day. It was more than possible that he hoped everything from a return to the scene of her girlish freedom and triumphs, and from her withdrawal from her husband’s influence; but he would watch and wait for the crucial moment before suggesting the facile American specific for matrimonial jars. He was very clever, and she did not doubt that if he were playing for the supreme desire of his life he would be sufficiently unscrupulous. But he was a gentleman and he would not demand her hand as the price of the Abbey’s rescue. If she had never met Cecil Maundrell she believed that she could have loved him, for he understood her. He was, now that he had found himself, a charming and companionable man, withno raw edges to irritate the most sensitive romanticism; and her Individuality would have flourished like a green bay-tree. And he had plenty of brains and was just serious enough. She could never have given him the half of what she had given Cecil Maundrell, but there would have been no violent and humiliating reactions from too much high-thinking and attempting to realise a serious man’s ideal. Now, neither he nor any other man but her husband could satisfy her for a moment; but as she had no desire to do Randolph any more harm than she had done him already she determined to take Mary Gifford to California with her and give that odd and attractive young person all the advantages of propinquity and comparison.
Emmy’s peccancy was but a final reason for her desire to separate herself for a time from her present life. She was charitable, but she was fastidious. Had Emmy been an outsider she might have had twenty lovers; but the proximity disgusted her.