If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an
idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver;
you would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and
transfixed with a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she
had done in her husband-hunt. The trouble was that van Tuiver was
not clever enough to realise this, and to trust her prowess against
other beasts in the social jungle.
Strange to me were such inside glimpses into the life of these two
favourites of the gods! I never grew weary of speculating about
them, and the mystery of their alliance. How had Sylvia come to make
this marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that
she was, she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with
him. Had she deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good
she imagined she could do to her family?
I was beginning to believe this. Irritated as she was by the solemn
snobberies of van Tuiver's world, it was none the less true that she
believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me
as I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social
graces, the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it.
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