第43章

'No,' said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was greater, she did not look at him.

'No.The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so forestall the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt.

For myself, I'm pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have much effect upon one's feeling, if it were the real thing.' He spoke practically to himself, as if he had reasoned this out many times.

'Oh, no!' said Madeline.

'But separation can do a worse thing than that.It can REINTRODUCEpeople, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they married.If they lived together the illusion would go, Isuppose, but custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar.

There never would be that awful revelation of indifference.'

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline's mind that her face expressed no personal concern for him.There was a small red stain in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added, 'I've known--in Bombay--one or two bad cases of that.

But, of course, it is the wife who suffers most.Shall we canter on?'

'In a minute,' said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal situation that gave them to him.

'Of course,' she said, thoughtfully, 'you know the Anglo-Indian world and I don't.You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds only too probable.And I confess it makes my little impression very vulgar and superficial.' She turned her head and a candid smile to him.'All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much that way are the exceptions.And--I don't care--I believe there is more cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind.What do you think I heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? "No man has touched my heart since I've been married," she proclaimed, "except my husband!" AT A TIFFIN-party!'

She heard the relief in Innes's laugh and was satisfied.

'How does it happen,' he said, 'that women nowadays are critical of the world so young?'

'I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society through a tambour-frame,' she said, hardily.

'And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to produce nothing like you,' he returned, and if there was ambiguity in his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture--Simla called it very American--which expressed that all chivalrous speech was to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned into the Ladies' Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance for meditation.She thought of the matter again that evening before her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently.She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and it brought her an excitement which she did not think of analyzing.She wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning, and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o'clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening.

Her last reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.

'There are no children,' it ran, 'and her health has always been good, he says.She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow, because of a natural antipathy to the country--and when she condescended to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks about.With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies.But I don't know why I should WANT her to be so disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs.Innes, travelling at the moment with the mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson features astonishingly different.