It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and examine frankly in all its bearings--in order to see if we can't better it--but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between us.
You would never have told me that you were unhappy----""You use the word again," she reminded him, a wan smile softening her protest.
Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair.
He held her glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding her.
"Do you tell me that you are happy?" he asked, with sober directness.
She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. "You consider only the extremes," she told him.
"Between black and white there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum, in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications.
People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak.
The worst that can be said of me is that I may be in the blues--in the light-blues--but it is fair to remember that they photograph white."Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling, he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. "That is to say"--he began hesitatingly.
"To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy.""Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?"The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.
"If I could tell myself," she answered him, after an instant's thought, "pray believe that I would tell you."The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily. "I want to get nearer to you," he said, with gloom, "and I don't!"It occurred to her to remark: "You take exception to my phraseology when I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean." She offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he gazed moodily.
"You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me," he was suddenly inspired to say. "I can't imagine your applying that word to me then in your mind.
God knows what it was you did say to yourself about me, but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would have fitted me then--and now it's the only one you can think of." The hint that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries enveloping him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke.
The year had wrought a baffling difference in him.
He lacked something now that then he had possessed, but he was powerless to define it.
He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm to keep her where she lightly rested beside him. "Will you tell me," he said, with a kind of sombre gentleness, "what the word is that you would have used then? I know you wouldn't--couldn't--have called me 'nice.' What would you have called me?"She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and stood erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his fingers. "I suppose,"she said, musingly--"I suppose I should have said 'powerful' or 'strong.'" Then she released her arm, and in turn moved to the parapet.
"And I am weak now--I am 'nice,'" he reflected, mechanically.
In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon, there was something pensive, even sad.
She did not speak at once, and as he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering.
A new sense of her great beauty came to him--and with it a hint that for the instant at least her guard was down.
He sprang to his feet, and stood beside her.
"You ARE going to be open with me--Edith!" he pleaded, softly.
She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation. "Oh, what is there to say?" she demanded, in a tone which was almost a wail. "It is not your fault.
I'm not blaming you."
"WHAT is not my fault?" he persisted with patient gentleness.
Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face.
"It is a mistake--a blunder," she began, hurriedly. "I take it all upon my own shoulders. I was the one who did it.
I should have had more judgment--more good sense!""You are not telling me, are you," he asked with gravity, "that you are sorry you married me?""Is either of us glad?" she retorted, breathlessly.
"What is there to be glad about? You are bored to death--you confess it. And I--well, it is not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach you.""No, you keep saying that," he observed, with gloomy slowness of utterance. "But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as well have it out.""Yes," she assented, with a swift reversion to calm.
Her eyes met his with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. "I married one man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am. There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am his daughter;that explains everything."
The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted;there was a woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all--a woman to whom he could talk on terms of intimacy.
"Rubbish!" he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal smile. "You didn't marry me for my money at all!
What nonsense! I simply came along and carried you off.
