Perhaps a third thing
was more usual still, tolerance. But for her at least neither was
tolerance the mood, for that is ill to build out of a mixture of intense
admiration and scornful contempt. These seemed likely to be the
predominant features of her life with her husband, sharing it so equally
that the one could never drive out the other nor yet come to fair terms
and, dividing the territory, live at peace.
"Perhaps they will some day," she thought, "when I get old and quiet."
She was neither old nor quiet now, and her youth cried out against so
poor a consolation. Then she told herself that she had the child, only to
reproach herself, a moment later, with the insincere repetition of a
commonplace. The child was not enough; had her nature been such as to
find the child enough, she would certainly never have become Alexander
Quisante's wife. Always when she was most strongly repelled by him, there
was in the back of her mind the feeling that it was something to be his
wife. Only--he mustn't be found out. The worst terror of all, at which
her half-jesting words to Marchmont had hinted, came back as she
murmured, "I wish we had more money.
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