Thus baited, Gundred grew furious. Her colour came and went, her manner became neater, cooler, blander than ever. And yet she could say so little. Mrs. Mimburn’s darts had found the weak spot that she was hiding even from herself. Through all her anger at Minne-Adélaïde’s insolence, the dialogue had for her a fearful, poignant interest that forbade her to follow her own first angry instincts, and cut it off with a snub.
‘I think you are quite mistaken,’ she replied. ‘And, anyhow, I should always be glad to see my husband being amused--no matter who it was by.’
‘Ah, you have the reckless unselfishness of the very young,’ answered Minne-Adélaïde intolerably. ‘That has wrecked so many marriages. “Trust nothing and nobody” ought to be one’s motto, and do all the amusing that may be necessary one’s self. It is safest in the long run--if one can do it, that is. However, you seem content to let someone else do it, and all I say is that I hope no harm will come of it. But when you want to take up your own position in your husband’s life again, you may find that someone else has filled it while you were ordering dinner and talking about the weather. It is even better, my dear, to bore your husband than to let him find that he can be kept amused all day and every day by someone else. I should get rid of the cousin, if I were you.’
‘Yes?’ answered Gundred, gelid with wrath, yet, despite herself, enthralled in Mrs. Mimburn’s dreadful foreshadowings. She began to have some notion what it was that she had been finding unsatisfactory in her relations with Kingston. He petted her more and more, but more and more did he talk to Isabel, and his recent efforts to include Gundred only revealed his inability to do so. This it was, this situation of her own making, that had been giving her secret, unacknowledged qualms, and feelings of vague hunger. The more proudly, then, did she revolt against Mrs. Mimburn’s insinuations, and the vigour of her anger was the measure of her inward conviction that the insinuations held some truth.
Minne-Adélaïde thought that she held Gundred helpless. She presumed on her power, made reckless at once by boredom and by gratified spite.
‘Oh, well,’ she pursued, ‘it may pay to leave your husband for ever alone with Isabel. I can’t say. It wouldn’t pay with any other man or any other woman. But, of course, your husband _may_ be an exception. Most husbands are--to their wives--until the catastrophe. Now, if I were you, I should want to know a great deal more about that night they got lost on the hill together--or said they did. That sort of thing isn’t done, you know. It wants a good deal of explaining.’