And with her knowledge there came a curious calm.
She no longer watched and worried Rowcliffe. She knew that no wife
ever kept her husband by watching and worrying him.
She was aware of danger and she faced it with restored complacency.
For Mary was a fount of sensual wisdom. Rowcliffe was ill. And
from his illness she inferred his misery, and from his misery his
innocence.
She told herself that nothing had happened, that she knew nothing that
she had not known before. She saw that her mistake had been in showing
that she knew it. That was to admit it, and to admit it was to give it
a substance, a shape and color it had never had and was not likely to
have.
And Mary, having perceived her blunder, set herself to repair it.
She knew how. Under all his energy she had discerned in her husband a
love of bodily ease, and a capacity for laziness, undeveloped because
perpetually frustrated. Insidiously she had set herself to undermine
his energy while she devised continual opportunities for ease.
Rowcliffe remained incurably energetic. His profession demanded
energy.
Still, there were ways by which he could be captured. He was not
so deeply absorbed in his profession as to be indifferent to the
arrangements of his home. He liked and he showed very plainly that he
liked, good food and silent service, the shining of glass and silver,
white table linen and fragrant sheets for his bed.
With all these things Mary had provided him.
And she had her own magic and her way.
Her way, the way she had caught him, was the way she would keep him.
She had always known her power, even unpracticed. She had always known
by instinct how she could enthrall him when her moment came. Gwenda
had put back the hour; but she had done (and Mary argued that
therefore she could do) no more.
Here Mary's complacency betrayed her. She had fallen into the error of
all innocent and tranquil sensualists. She trusted to the present. She
had reckoned without Rowcliffe's future or his past.
And she had done even worse. By habituating Rowcliffe's senses to her
way, she had produced in him, through sheer satisfaction, that sense
of security which is the most dangerous sense of all.