"Ah, my dear!" she would say, "how you fly about, and gather honey and all sorts of curious other things! And I sit here. I never know anything except what you are good enough to come and tell me. And so Jack is _amouraché_ again of his wife? So charming, is she not? Let us play Bridge immediately."
Mildred, however, did not think that things were quite so satisfactory. At first the idea of Jack and Marie Darby-and-Joaning it together sent her into fits of laughter. But after a week or so the joke began to lose its point--or, to state it more accurately, the point became rather too sharp for her liking. Jack and she had settled that they were to see less of each other, and not give any ground for people to say behind their backs what was perfectly and absolutely true; but she had not bargained for this return to intimacy between husband and wife. Once she had approached Jack on the subject.
"You are very realistic," she had said, "and have a great respect for detail."
"Oh, don't be stupid! You are taking your part very seriously. You see nothing of me--that is all right; but is it necessary to bore yourself quite so much with Marie?"
"I try not to do that," said Jack with curdling equanimity. "But what are you driving at? Do you want me to mourn for you, to watch the shadow on your blind? That would be rather unconvincing to other people, would it not?"
"I don't want them to say anything about us at all," he answered, and again the sense of imperfect grip haunted the woman, and the sense of having been talking to a cook the man.
Nor was this the sum of Mildred's discomfort. She had amiably proposed not long ago to break with Marie, but now that the opportunity was ripe she felt herself simply unable to do so. There was a deficiency of force in her--moral or immoral, it matters not which--which was unable to stand up to the other. Also, she was dimly aware that people in general were watching her, looking at her rather as they had done when, now years ago, her hair had turned golden in a single night. But now the cause was not so tangible. Was it that she herself, not her hair only, was turning gray? Certainly she was conscious of a failure of power. It was in vain that she ate her many solid meals, or, as the whim took her, lived on varalettes and lean meat, vowing that this treatment made the whole difference to her; it was in vain she slept her solid six hours, drove a great deal in the fresh air, and kept her windows unwontedly open. People, the hundred diverting situations in which her friends daily found themselves, diverted her less, and she wondered whether the truth was, as fashion papers assured her, that the season was not very brilliant, or whether it was she who was losing the power to be amused. The thought of old age, a veritable bogey to one who has always felt young, sat daily by her in the empty seat of the victoria, and flapped in the wind-stirred blind of her bedroom at dark hours.