What was the use of it all? What was the use of being beautiful, of being young, rich? What was the use of having married a man she had loved? What was the use? What was the use?
“What’s the use?” she sobbed the words out again and again.
For the man was a fool, Fritz was a fool. She thought of him at that moment as half-witted. For he saw nothing, nothing. He was a blind man led by his animal passions, and when at last he was forced to see, when she came and, as it were, lifted his eyelids with her fingers, and said to him, “Look! Look at what has been done to me!” he could only be angry for himself, because the insult had attained him, because she happened to be his wife. It seemed to her, while she was crying there, that stupidity combined with egoism must have the power to kill even that vital, enduring thing, a woman’s love. She had begun to idealise Fritz, but how could she go on idealising him? And she began for the first time really to understand--or to begin to understand--that there actually was something within her which was hungry, unsatisfied, something which was not animal but mental, or was it spiritual?--something not sensual, not cerebral, which cried aloud for sustenance. And this something did not, could never, cry to Fritz. It knew he could not give it what it wanted. Then to whom did it cry? She did not know.
Presently she grew calmer and sat upon the bed, looking straight before her. Her mind returned upon itself. She seemed to go back to that point of time, just before Lady Cardington called, when she had the programme in her hand and thought of the gossamer threads that were as iron in her life, and in such lives as hers; then to move on to that other point of time when she laid down the programme, sighed, and was conscious of a violent desire for release, for something to come and lift a powerful hand and brush away the spider’s web.
But now, returning to this further moment in her life, she asked herself what would be left to her if the spider’s web were gone? The believers in the angel? Perhaps she no longer included Fritz among them. The impotence of his mind seemed to her an impotence of heart just then. He was to her like a numbed creature, incapable of movement, incapable of thought, incapable of belief. Credulity--yes, but not belief. And so, when she looked at the believers, she saw but a few people: Robin Pierce, Sir Donald--whom else?