He laughed, in gay good humour again. Clytie echoed with a faint smile.
“Thornton,” she said after a short pause, “I don't want to bother you about politics if you don't like it”--she felt now a strange hesitation in speaking to him--“but you know you'll have to convert me, dear. It has been on my mind for some time. You are a Tory, you know, and I have been a Radical hitherto in feelings and sympathies.”
He burst out laughing at her little air of seriousness. Perhaps if he had known how he hurt her, he would not have treated the matter so cavalierly. This difference in political views had been a question of some concern to Clytie, who was aware of old-fashioned Tory prejudices. And Thornton took her Radicalism as a jest, attributing no importance to the difference of opinion.
“You'll change when we get back and become a shining light in the Primrose League.”
She was too depressed by the whole of the foregoing conversation to pursue the subject any further. Thornton started the lighter topic of personal criticism of their new acquaintances in Paris, and rattled on in great spirits. He had forgotten entirely the argument that Clytie's somewhat unconventional action had occasioned, and was as boyishly gay as ever. But men forget things much more easily than women, especially when they have no object in remembering, nor any reminiscent twinge of susceptibility.
That evening Clytie spent alone. Thornton was dining at the Café des Ambassadeurs with some men from the Embassy. He had kissed her before he started, called himself a selfish brute for condemning her to a dull evening, and went away humming a café-concert air. She did not mind his leaving her, took it now as a matter of course that each should be to a certain extent independent of the other; for the glamour of the south had departed, and the practicalities of life had begun to assert themselves. But it was the first wretched evening of her married life. She would have liked to cry, but as she was not of those who cry easily, she sat with eyes all the more painful for being strained and tearless. She had received a great shock. Ever since she had rebelled against the Durdleham formula that men were to descend from their intellectual sublimity when they spoke to women, lest like Semele the latter should be consumed in the Jovian blaze, she had been accustomed to meet men freely on an intellectual level. To find herself in a society where this particular formula was unknown had been one of the earliest joys of her emancipated life. She had very little vanity in the matter of her own attainments, but she took it for granted that her associates should recognise in her a woman of ordinary culture, capable of forming rational opinions. Her intelligence was keen, her judgment fine. She had read, thought, observed. Her art was to a certain extent a matter of intellect as well as of instinctive feeling, and in this respect had been stimulated by her intercourse with Kent. In the glow of her young, ardent nature she had committed many extravagances, but they all had borne the indubitable stamp of a mind strenuous in its endeavours. None but fools had ever thought of condescending to Clytie because she was a woman.