“Yes,” he surprised her by saying; “on me.”
“You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam and Eve. But that’s not what I meant.”
“On me,” he said again. “I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it.”
“Well,” said Anne, “I’ve not come here to crow, but I’ve the advantage of you in that. I did not consent,” and her eye strayed involuntarily to a scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. “I didn’t consent because I knew they weren’t in love. I told Sam I knew it.”
“Then,” said Peter, “you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone.”
“Because I knew love matters? There’s nowt so wonderful in knowing that, and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love is marred from start to finish.”
“Love matters,” he agreed. “It matters all, for God is love.”
“We’ll come to an agreement, you and me,” she said appreciatively. “We’ve the same mind about the root of things.”
“This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone.”
“I’m none denying it. It’s a terrible thing for a man and wife to live together when love’s not a lodger in the house; it’s wrong, and the worst of wrong is that it won’t stay single. Wrong’s got to breed. But, there,” she finished briskly, “I’m telling you what you know, and when all’s said, there’s nowt so bad that it’s past mending.”
“Ada wants a divorce,” said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came into Anne’s eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said, without believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to arrange indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which really solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who was proving at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common sense.
Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it, and he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print.
Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to his grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his words came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than his horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy at Ada’s practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to her, quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was that Peter should be happy about it.