"Men's made different and treated differently," he said. "And they'd
never stand anything else."
Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her left
hand and held it tightly in her lap.
"You mean," she said, in a hard, quiet voice, "that you may humiliate
your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she
enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the
one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my
devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn't take much to kill it. Perhaps it's
dead already."
No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
she thought that probably it was truth.
"Eh?" said Lord Holme.
He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered in
shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement, that
overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo Ulford's
midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the uttermost
faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps her love for
him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man. Had his conceit
then no limits?
And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too, a
firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set
among the men who worship the sirens of the world.
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