Chapter 16 - Page 2

close, and he saw her lips
curving for a kiss. Every line of her face sought him, from the sweep of
the narrowed eyelids to the dimples that played away from her smile. His
eye received the picture with distinctness; but for the first time it
did not pass into his veins. It was as if he had been struck with a
subtle blindness that permitted images to give their colour to the eye
but communicated nothing to the brain.

"Good-night," he said, as he passed on.

When a man felt in that way about a woman he was surely in a position to
deal with his case impartially. This came to Ralph as the joyless solace
of the morning. At last the bandage was off and he could see. And what
did he see? Only the uselessness of driving his wife to subterfuges that
were no longer necessary. Was Van Degen her lover? Probably not--the
suspicion died as it rose. She would not take more risks than she could
help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted. She wanted
to enjoy herself, and her conception of enjoyment was publicity,
promiscuity--the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of
covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security.
Any personal entanglement might mean "bother," and bother was the thing
she most abhorred. Probably, as the queer formula went, his "honour"
was safe: he could count on the letter of her fidelity. At moment the
conviction meant no more to him than if he had been assured of the
honesty of the first strangers he met in the street. A stranger--that
was what she had always been to him. So malleable outwardly, she had
remained insensible to the touch of the heart.

These thoughts accompanied him on his way to business the next morning.
Then, as the routine took him back, the feeling of strangeness
diminished. There he was again at his daily task--nothing tangible was
altered. He was there for the same purpose as yesterday: to make money
for his wife and child. The woman he had turned from on the stairs a few
hours earlier was still his wife and the mother of Paul Marvell. She was
an inherent part of his life; the inner disruption had not resulted in
any outward upheaval. And with the sense of inevitableness there came a
sudden wave of pity. Poor Undine! She was what the gods had made her--a
creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure. He
had no desire to "preach down" such heart as she had--he felt only a
stronger wish to reach it, teach it, move it to something of the pity
that filled his own. They were fellow-victims in the noyade of marriage,
but if they ceased to struggle perhaps the drowning would be easier for
both...Meanwhile the first of the month was at hand, with its usual
batch of bills;