“You need not trouble to display all this feeling on my account,” I
said. “It was quite enough to make him as unhappy as you did while he
was alive, without playing the broken-hearted widow.”
“You are very like him, you know,” she observed. “You have just his way
of snubbing and repressing people. You don’t seem to understand that
everybody can’t keep their feelings bottled up as you do. It was not my
fault that he was unhappy. I think he had an unhappy nature.”
“That is nonsense,” I said, “and you know it. My father was a most
simple, friendly, companionable man—only you never would be a real wife
to him.”
“He wouldn’t let me,” she said. “I know we didn’t hit it off very well,
at the end, but I did try, Paul. I did indeed. In the beginning I was
ready to give him all the love and affection that was in me. But he
didn’t like it. He dried me up. He broke my spirit, Paul.”
“My father was not a demonstrative man,” I said, “but you know quite
well that he was proud of you and devoted to you. If you had heard him
speak of you as I have heard him—”
“Ah!” she said, quickly, “but I never did. That was the trouble. What is
the good of being praised behind one’s back if one is always being
scolded and snubbed to one’s face? It only makes it worse. Everyone
thinks one has such a good husband, and that one ought to be so happy
and grateful—and all the time they never know what one is suffering
from unkind words and cold looks at home.”
“Many women would envy you,” I said. “Would you rather have had a
husband who was all charming manners at home and unfaithful the minute
your back was turned?”
“Yes,” she said, “I would.”
“I can’t understand you,” I said. “You ought to be ashamed to speak like
this.”
“No,” she said, “you can’t understand. That’s it. Neither could he.”
“All I understand is that you ruined his life, and drove him to a
dreadful death,” I burst out. I had not meant to go so far, but I was
too angry to think what I was saying.
“What do you mean?” she said. “Oh, no—you can’t think that he——But
why should he?”