Irritated at first by Isabel’s mental jumps and flights, Gundred, after her attempts at repression had failed, grew tired and bored, made no effort to follow her cousin’s mental movements, and, with a mildly reproving air which nobody noticed, stood graciously aloof from Isabel’s dialogues with Kingston. She let them talk, and, by way of tacitly rebuking her cousin, ostentatiously ceased to take any interest in what they said.
With Kingston, as was inevitable, this course insensibly began to shift her relationship. As the days went by, he talked more and more to Isabel, until by degrees she became insensibly the target for everything he said. Imperceptibly he grew to ignore his wife, thanks to the attitude that she assumed. However, she was perfectly, increasingly happy. For, as his intellectual intimacy with Isabel advanced, he grew more and more the warm lover of his wife. And she, the apparently cold and ethereal, by the irony of her own limitations, came at last to base the triumph of her wifehood on the strength of her husband’s embraces. His raptures, his compliments, his kisses, grew in number and ardour; she had her heart’s desire. No thought of jealousy could ever have approached her; for intellectual intimacy she had no taste, no wish. As long as she had Kingston’s arms, Isabel was perfectly welcome to a monopoly of his tongue. She, Gundred, was his wife, and nothing could alter the glory of that. She triumphed in the successful development of their relations.
That men like to chatter and overflow and sweat off in talk the superfluous energy of their minds she knew to be an accepted fact. Some women are born for men to talk to, but the ultimate triumph belongs to the wife, the woman who orders the man’s dinner, sees to his comforts, has him for her property at bed and board. As long as his body remains faithful and loyal, who cares where his undisciplined mind may go roving from hour to hour? So Gundred was glad to compound for Kingston’s increasing affection by welcoming the distractions in which his mind indulged, and even, in the rare moments when she could divert her attention from her own bliss, was vaguely sorry for Isabel, reduced to so poor and undignified a rôle as that of wash-pot to the intellectual offscourings of a married man. But Isabel, after all, had brought the humiliation on herself, and Gundred soon returned to the contemplation of the mastery which she had established over her husband’s affection by providing him with someone to talk to. Wifely tact, she felt, had been splendidly justified. She never stopped to consider that the means by which she had achieved her end in themselves betrayed the disastrous weakness of her position. Her idea of temptation was limited to physical allurements; husbands, she knew, were only led away by bad, beautiful women, never by untidy, talkative ones. Her position was absolutely safe and dominant; the more freely her husband’s mind was allowed to wander and kick up its heels, the more securely was her husband’s body bound in the bonds of its allegiance. Infidelity is only a matter of the flesh. Without physical desire there can be no adultery.