She
stuttered, halted, and finally fell silent. Her words were like so many
lassos thrown after his vagrant soul; and this was out of reach. It had
sniffed freedom--it WAS free; ran wild already on the boundless plains
of liberty.
After he had gone from the room she sat with idle hands. She was all in
a daze. Richard was about to commit an out-and-out folly, and she was
powerless to hinder it. If only she had had some one she could have
talked things over with, taken advice of! But no--it went against the
grain in her to discuss her husband's actions with a third person. Purdy
had been the sole exception, and Purdy had become impossible.
Looking back, she marvelled at her own dullness in not fore-seeing that
something like this might happen. What more natural than that the
multitude of little whims and fads Richard had indulged should culminate
in a big whim of this kind? But the acknowledgment caused her fresh
anxiety. She had watched him tire, like a fickle child, of first one
thing, then another; was it likely that he would now suddenly prove more
stable? She did not think so. For she attributed his present mood of
pettish aversion wholly to the fact of his being run down in health. It
was quite true: he had not been himself of late. But, here again, he was
so fanciful that you never knew how literally to take his ailments: half
the time she believed he just imagined their existence; and the long
holiday she had urged on him would have been enough to sweep the cobwebs
from his brain.
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