Chapter 31 - Page 2

day, and by which train, she was
returning to Washington. In that train he intended to
join her, and travel with her to Washington, or as
much farther as she was willing to go. His own fancy
inclined to Japan. At any rate she would understand at
once that, wherever she went, he was going. He meant
to leave a note for May that should cut off any other
alternative.

He had fancied himself not only nerved for this
plunge but eager to take it; yet his first feeling on
hearing that the course of events was changed had been
one of relief. Now, however, as he walked home from
Mrs. Mingott's, he was conscious of a growing distaste
for what lay before him. There was nothing unknown
or unfamiliar in the path he was presumably to tread;
but when he had trodden it before it was as a free man,
who was accountable to no one for his actions, and
could lend himself with an amused detachment to the
game of precautions and prevarications, concealments
and compliances, that the part required. This procedure
was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and
the best fiction, combined with the after-dinner talk of
his elders, had long since initiated him into every detail
of its code.

Now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part
in it seemed singularly diminished. It was, in fact, that
which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs.
Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving
husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful
and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in
every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and
every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a
wife to play such a part toward her husband. A woman's
standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be
lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the
arts of the enslaved. Then she could always plead moods
and nerves, and the right not to be held too strictly to
account; and even in the most strait-laced societies the
laugh was always against the husband.

But in Archer's little world no one laughed at a wife
deceived, and a certain measure of contempt was
attached to men who continued their philandering after
marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a recognised
season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown
more than once.

Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he
thought Lefferts despicable. But to love Ellen Olenska
was not to become a man like Lefferts: for the first
time Archer found himself face to face with the dread
argument of the individual case. Ellen Olenska was like
no other woman, he was like no other man: their
situation, therefore, resembled no