“Are you or are you not proud of the fact that your best friend,
Armitage, is a fashionable person? Would you be as proud of him if he
were only welcome in middle-class houses?”
“I’m ashamed to say there’s something in that,” said I. “Not much, but
something.”
“Yet you believed Mary Kirkwood!” ended Edna.
“I thought little about it,” said I. “And I still believe that she is
sincere--that she has no snobbishness in her.”
“You like her?”
“So far as I know her--yes.” My answer was an attempt to meet and
parry a suspicion I felt in Edna’s mind. And it was fairly successful;
fairly--for no one ever yet completely dislodged a suspicion. We
cannot see into each other’s minds. We know, from what is going on in
our own minds, that the human mind is capable of any vagary. Once we
have applied this general principle to a specific person, once we have
become definitely aware that there are in that person’s mind things of
which we have no knowledge--from that time forth suspicion of them is
in us, and is ready to grow, to flourish.
I had no difficulty in shifting to the subject of the marriage. “I’ll
cable for my lawyer,” said I. “If anyone can beat this game, Fred
Norman can.”
“Yes--send for him,” said Edna. “He is canny--and a man of _our_ world.”
“I’m going back to London to-night--” I went on.
“To-night!” she exclaimed. Her eyes filled with tears. “Godfrey--is
this treating us right?”
I looked at her intently. “Don’t fake with me,” said I quietly. “It
isn’t necessary.”
“What _do_ you mean?” cried she.
“I mean, I understand perfectly that you care nothing about me,
except as the source of the money you need in amusing yourself. As
you see in my manner, I am not wildly agitated by that fact. So far
as I’m concerned, there’s no reason why we should make each other
uncomfortable.”
“What _is_ the matter with you, Godfrey?” she said, with large widening
eyes gazing at me. “You have changed entirely.”
“As you have,” said I, admiring her shrewdness, and afraid of it.
“You’ve been educating. So have I. Mine has been slower than yours and
along different lines. But it, too, has been thorough.”
She was not satisfied, though I’m confident my tone and manner betrayed
nothing. Said she: “Some bad woman has been poisoning you against
Margot and me.”
“As you please,” said I, too wary to be drawn into that discussion.
I realized I had said entirely too much. Relying upon her intense
vanity, her profound belief in her power over me, I had gone too far.
“My business takes me to London to-night. I’ll probably be there until
Norman arrives. Then we’ll come over.”
“Don’t you want us in London with you?” said Edna.
“You are comfortably settled here,” replied I. “Why disturb yourselves?”
She knew how to read me. She saw I was not in a dangerous mood, as
she had begun to fear. She said: “We _did_ intend to stay in Paris a
month or six weeks. We have a charming circle of friends among the
old families here. I wish you’d stop on, Godfrey. The people are
attractive, and the social life is most interesting.”
“Not to me,” said I. “You forget I’m a Hooligan. Besides, you don’t
need me. There’s your advantage through being young and lovely and
rich. You can get plenty of men to escort you about. It’s only the old
and ugly married women who really need their husbands. Well--I’ll be
ready when you are forced to fall back on me. Nothing like having in
reserve a faithful Dobbin.”
She looked hurt. “How _can_ you joke about sacred things,” she
reproached.
I laughed her seriousness aside. “Yes, I’ll be waiting, ready to be
your companion, the confidant of your rheumatism and gout, when all the
others have fled. Meanwhile, my dear, I’ll have my frisk.”
“Godfrey!”
It amused me to see how bitter to her was the taste of the medicine she
had been forcing upon me so self-complacently. It amused me to watch
the confusion into which these new and unsuspected aspects of myself
was throwing her.
Said I: “I’m glad you’re as generous toward me as I’ve been toward you.
That’s why we’ve avoided the Armitage sort of smash-up.”
When I left Paris that night I’ll engage she was thinking about me as
she had never thought in her whole self-centered, American-female life.