Sinclair did not answer. He frowned and looked sulkily at me with lustreless eyes. He was out of health, and out of spirits, and ill at ease.
The large, luxurious room, with its dim oriental carpets and its shaded lights, and its wonderful array of Indian pictures and its two exquisite rose-red lacquer cabinets, had a great charm for me who lived in small lodgings in the city near my work. But it seemed to hold little pleasure for him. I sometimes doubted whether anything held much pleasure for him. He had just returned from China. The great packing cases piled one above another in the hall were no doubt full of marvellous acquisitions, china, embroideries, rugs. But he did not seem to care to unpack them.
"Did I really spoil your marriage?" he said listlessly. He looked old and haggard and leaden-coloured, and it was difficult to believe he was the magnificent personage who had diverted Mildred's eyes from me ten years before.
"Don't pretend you didn't know it at the time," I retorted.
His behaviour had been outrageous, and I, with my snub nose and crab-like gait, had been cast aside. I could not blame her. He was like a prince in a fairy tale. I never blamed her. She knows that now; in short, she knows everything.
"No, my pepper pot, I won't pretend I didn't know it. But I thought--I had a strong impression--I was mistaken, of course, but I thought that--"
"That it was _she_," he said below his breath.
"She looked like it," he went on more to himself than to me. "She had a sweet face. I thought it _might_ be she. But it was not."
"Perhaps you will be interested to hear that she and I have made it up."
"I am," he said, and his dull eyes lightened, "if you are sure she is the right woman; really sure, I mean."
"I've known that for eleven years," I said, "but the difficulty has been to get the same idea firmly into her head. At any rate, it's in now. I've tattooed it on every square inch of her mind, so to speak. If I had been let alone she would have been my downtrodden, ill-used wife, and I should have been squandering her money for the last ten years. I shall have to hammer her twice a day and get heavily into debt to make up for lost time. Why don't you marry yourself, Sinclair? That is what you want, though you don't know it; what I want, what we all want, someone to bully, something weaker than ourselves to trample on."