s
endeavour to draw her out. "It's all the more intense then," he
answered. And he added almost as if he were giving her a friendly
counsel: "This is a very important matter." She recognised that; she
was fully conscious of the weight of the occasion; she knew that between
them they had arrived at a crisis. Its gravity made her careful; she
said nothing, and he went on. "You say I've no reason? I have the very
best. I dislike, from the bottom of my soul, what you intend to do. It's
dishonourable; it's indelicate; it's indecent. Your cousin is nothing
whatever to me, and I'm under no obligation to make concessions to him.
I've already made the very handsomest. Your relations with him, while he
was here, kept me on pins and needles; but I let that pass, because from
week to week I expected him to go. I've never liked him and he has never
liked me. That's why you like him--because he hates me," said Osmond
with a quick, barely audible tremor in his voice. "I've an ideal of what
my wife should do and should not do. She should not travel across Europe
alone, in defiance of my deepest desire, to sit at the bedside of other
men. Your cousin's nothing to you; he's nothing to us. You smile most
expressively when I talk about US, but I assure you that WE, WE, Mrs.
Osmond, is all I know. I take our marriage seriously; you appear to
have found a way of not doing so. I'm not aware that we're divorced or
separated; for me we're indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than
any human creature, and I'm nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable
proximity; it's one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You
don't like to be reminded of that, I know; but I'm perfectly willing,
because--because--" And he paused a moment, looking as if he had
something to say which would be very much to the point. "Because I think
we should accept the consequences of our actions, and what I value most
in life is the honour of a thing!"

He spoke gravely and almost gently; the accent of sarcasm had dropped
out of his tone. It had a gravity which checked his wife's quick
emotion; the resolution with which she had entered the room found itself
caught in a mesh of fine threads. His last words were not a command,
they constituted a kind of appeal; and, though she felt that any
expression of respect on his part could only be a refinement of egotism,
they represented something transcendent and absolute, like the sign
of the cross or the flag of one's country.