“Look here, Randal,” Adrian said seriously, “you perturb me very much. You speak actually as if you are still--still sentimentally interested in this woman--another man’s wife--because you discover----”
“That both she and her husband are sentimentally interested in me; ha! ha! ha!” Randal interrupted.
“I could never imagine such a thing,--it perturbs me,” Adrian persisted seriously.
“It perturbs me, too,” declared Randal quizzically, “to have you gadding about in my likeness, escorting other men’s wives,--the gay Lothario that you are!--and getting _me_ into the papers, the public prints. Oh, fie, fie.”
“And she _is_ another man’s wife,” remonstrated Adrian.
“She won’t be long if she has a spark of spirit left,” declared Randal boldly. “She will bring suit for divorce herself.”
“But I doubt if she can get it,” said Adrian in dismay.
The difference of mood made itself manifest in the tones of their voices--Adrian’s crisp, imperative, even tinctured with sternness, Randal’s careless, musical, drawling.
“Oh, she can get it fast enough. I should think from what I observed of his manner to her she could prove enough instances of cruelty and tyranny to melt almost any trial judge.”
Adrian reflected silently upon the episodes on the _Cherokee Rose_, but kept his own counsel, while the smoke curled softly above the duplicate heads.
“When I saw them together,” observed Randal, “he impressed me as being a veritable despot, and in a queer way, too. I can’t understand his satisfaction in it. He arrogated the largest liberty to criticize her views and actions, as if his dictum were the fiat of last resort. I tell you now, kid, criticism and cavil in themselves are incompatible with love. No man can depreciate and adore at the same time the same object. When he thinks the feet of his idol are of clay the whole structure might as well come down at once. He seemed to have a certain perversity, and this is a connubial foible I have seen in better men, too; a tendency to contradict her in small, immaterial matters for the sheer pleasure of contrariety, I suppose,--to oppose her, to balk her, merely because he could with impunity. I imagine he has enjoyed a long lease of this impunity because his perversity has attained such unusual proportions, and her plunges of opposition had the style of sudden revolt rather than the practiced habit of contention. She has lived a life of repression and submission with him. Her identity is pretty much annihilated. The Paula of her earlier days is nearly all disappeared.”