CHAPTER XXIX.
AN EPOCH-MAKING DEPARTURE.
A woman never moralizes until she has committed an immoral act. From the moment she voluntarily accepts it until the moment she casts it aside, she may do distasteful duty to the letter, but she does it mechanically. The laws and canons are laid down, and she follows them without analysis, however rebelliously. She may long for the forbidden as consistently as she accepts her yoke, whether the yoke be of untempted girlhood or hated matrimony; but the longing serves to deepen her antipathy to bonds; she sees no beauty in average conditions. After she has plucked the apple and eaten it raw, skin, core and all, and is suffering from the indigestion thereof, she is enabled to analytically compare it with such fruits as do not induce dyspepsia.
Although Hermia was far from acknowledging that she loved Quintard, she allowed him occasionally to reign in her imagination, and had more than one involuntary, abstract, but tender interview with him. This, she assured herself, was purely speculative, and in the way of objective amusement, like the theater or the opera. When she found that she thought of him always as her husband she made no protest; he was too good for anything less. Nor, she decided, had she met him earlier and been able to love him, would she have been content with any more imperfect union.
Cryder still came with more or less regularity. There were brief, frantic moments, as when she had sought death in the torrent; but on the whole she was too indifferent to break with him. Her life was already ruined; what mattered her actions? Moreover, habit is a tremendous force, and he had a certain hold over her, a certain fascination, with which the physical had nothing to do.
After she had known Quintard about two months she found herself free. Cryder, in truth, was quite as tired as herself. Ennui was in his tideless veins, and, moreover, the time had come to add another flower to his herbarium. But he did not wish to break with Hermia until his time came to leave the city. If she had loved him, it might have been worth while to hurt her; but, as even his egoism could not persuade him that she gave him more than temperate affection, he would not risk the humiliation of being laughed at.
One evening he told her that he must go South the following week and remain several months. His dialect was growing rusty, and the public would expect another novel from him in the coming spring. He hated to say good-bye to her, but his muse claimed his first and highest duty. Hermia felt as one who comes out of a room full of smoke—she wanted to draw a long breath and throw back her head. She replied very politely, however—they were always very polite—that she should miss him and look forward to his return. Neither would avow that this was the end of the matter, but each was devoutly thankful that the other was not a fool.
Cryder looked melancholy and handsome when he came to say good-bye. He had on extremely becoming traveling clothes, and his skin and eyes had their accustomed clearness. He bade Hermia a tender farewell, and his eyes looked resigned and sad. Then an abstracted gaze passed into them, as if his spirit had floated upward to a plane far removed from common affection.
Hermia had much ado to keep her mouth from curling. She remembered what Quintard had once said of him: that he always wanted to throw him on a table to see if he would ring. Bah! what a _poseur_ he was! Then she mentally shrugged her shoulders. His egoism had its value; he had never noticed the friendship which existed between her and Quintard. Had he been a jealous man he would have been insufferable.
After he had gone he seemed to glide out of her life—out of the past as of the present. She found herself barely able to recall him, his features, his characteristics. For a long time she never thought of him unless some one mentioned his name, and then she wondered if he had not been the hero of a written sketch rather than of an actual episode.
Whether it was owing to Cryder’s removal or to Quintard’s influence, she could not tell, but she found herself becoming less blasé. Her spirits were lighter, people interested her more, life seemed less prosaic. She asked Quintard once what it meant, and he told her, with his usual frankness, that it was the spring. This offended her, and she did not speak for ten minutes.
On another occasion he roused her to wrath. He told her one day that on the night he met her he had been impressed with a sense of unreality about her; and, acting on a sudden impulse, she told him the history of her starved and beautiless girlhood. When she finished she expected many comments, but Quintard merely put another log of wood on the fire and remarked:
“That is all very interesting, but I am warned that the dinner-hour approaches. Farewell, I will see you at Mrs. Dykman’s this evening.”
Hermia looked at the fire for some time after he had gone. She was thankful that fate had arranged matters in such wise that she was not to spend her life with Quintard. He could be, at times, the most disagreeable man she had ever known, and there was not a grain of sympathy in his nature. And, yes, he _was_ prosaic!
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