A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [13]
Very likely!
Or was it--that was the intolerable thought that she shut up within her along with the material for castles in the air!--was it because he had been really indifferent?
They had revolved round each other at tea-parties--or rather he had revolved around her, because at Edith Ethel's affairs she always sat, a fixed starlet, behind the tea-urn and dispensed cups. But he would moon round the room, looking at the backs of books; occasionally laying down the law to some guest; and always drifting in the end to her side where he would say a trifle or two...And the beautiful--the quite excruciatingly beautiful wife--striding along the Row with the second son of the Earl of someone at her side...Asking for it...
So it had been from the 1/7/12, say to the 4/8/14!
After that, things had become more rubbled--mixed up with alarums. Excursions on his part to unapproved places. And trouble. He was quite damnably in trouble. With his Superiors; with, so unnecessarily, Hun projectiles, wire, mud; over Money; politics; mooning on without a good word from anyone...Unravellable muddles that never got unravelled but that somehow got you caught up in them...
Because he needed her moral support! When, during the late Hostilities, he hadn't been out there, he had drifted to the tea-table much earlier of an afternoon and stayed beside it much longer: till after everyone else had gone and they could go and sit on the tall fender side by side, and argue...about the rights and wrongs of the War!
Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk...They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic...No doubt a touch...in him. Otherwise he would not have always been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was all right. But that those who sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes...That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that!
Because...if you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest--those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst you moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his Nearest and Dearest...Or had been!
At that her nerves suddenly got the better of her and her mind went mad...Supposing that that fellow, from whom she had not heard for two years, hadn't now communicated with her...Like an ass she had taken it for granted that he had asked Lady...Blast her!...to 'bring them together again' But she imagined that even Edith Ethel would not have had the cheek to ring her up if he hadn't asked her to!
But she had nothing to go on...Feeble, over-sexed ass that she was, she had let her mind jump at once to the conclusion, the moment the mere mention of him seemed implied--jump to the conclusion that he was asking her again to come and be his mistress...Or nurse him through his present muddle till he should be fit to...
Mind, she did not say that she would have succumbed. But if she had not jumped at the idea that it was he, really, speaking through Edith Ethel, she would never have permitted her mind to dwell on...on his blasted, complacent perfections!
Because she had taken it for granted that if he had had her rung up he would not have been monkeying with other girls during the two years he hadn't written to her...Ah, but hadn't he?
Look here! Was it reasonable? Here was a fellow who had all but...all BUT...'taken advantage of her' one night just before going out to France, say, two years ago...And not another word from him after that!...It was all very well to say that he was portentous, looming, luminous, loony: John Peel with his coat so grey, the English Country Gentleman pur sang and then some; saintly; Godlike, Jesus-Christ-like...He was all that. But you don't seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell, and not so much as send her, in two years, a picture-postcard with MIZPAH on it. You don't. You don't!
Or