Glune was his now again, a princely wedding gift from Calvert and Beadon, but all pleasure in the possession was gone.
A French writer once said that it is impossible to predict of any woman the exact change that marriage will make in her. We have all seen love turn to hate in a few hours under certain circumstances, but there are subtler changes still. Great emotions may bring havoc to certain natures; change comes inevitably, whether the emotions be great or small. Perhaps Dora had cared for Farquharson so far as in her lay before he became her husband, but now he was her property, an object of daily use, as important, perhaps, as her sponge or toothbrush, but quite unworthy of any deep regard. It was better to be with him than without him. It never struck her that she owed him any duty; if she thought about the matter at all it was merely to consider that a beneficent Creator had brought him into being for the special purpose of accompanying her when she wanted him, and transacting the business that she had slurred even as an unmarried woman; investing her money to its best advantage, and paying bills about whose magnitude she no longer felt even the smallest compunction.
With those early days of marriage she was entirely content and satisfied. No doubt of her ability to please him crossed her mind; the useless are invariably self-satisfied. She had mapped out a motor tour which was intended to outdo anything that other brides had accomplished; restless, untiring, she swept Farquharson on from place to place, great towns and cities whose very stones breathed glory and mystery, under the shadows of mountains which at night looked cold and full of awe, types of the crushing power that seemed to rule men's destinies, but which were warmed and quickened to life by the first gleam of the morning sun. Beauty, tradition, mystery, these things meant nothing to Dora, and Farquharson, who longed to stay, was openly derided. Of late years he had had little or no time to spare for the love of nature which had trained him as a boy; he steeped his soul in colour which she did not even see.
They went from big hotel to big hotel; nights spent in little village inns bored Dora inexpressibly. Day after day she went out of their road to buy the English papers. If their tour was not mentioned in them she flung them aside; when it was, she collected the cuttings eagerly. Farquharson realized that for his wife the meaning of life was resolved into a single hope--that the glare of publicity should be for ever upon them. He thought of the future. He could picture her at Glune, entertaining the Press, dragging out his relics, giving chapter and verse succinctly of all those dear records which had made him what he was. She would gossip with the villagers, she would leave no stone unturned to find out all about his childhood, and then repeat it at her next afternoon call. Nothing was sacred to her, and now for Evelyn's sake he had learned to look upon women as sacred, and to try to understand something even of his mother's nature. Women like Dora would drag her memory and his brother's in the dust that they might make suitable headlines for an "interview."