Mrs.Saltram made a great affair of her right to be informed where her husband had been the second evening he failed to meet his audience.She came to me to ascertain, but I couldn't satisfy her, for in spite of my ingenuity I remained in ignorance.It wasn't till much later that I found this had not been the case with Kent Mulville, whose hope for the best never twirled the thumbs of him more placidly than when he happened to know the worst.He had known it on the occasion I speak of--that is immediately after.He was impenetrable then, but ultimately confessed.What he confessed was more than I shall now venture to make public.It was of course familiar to me that Saltram was incapable of keeping the engagements which, after their separation, he had entered into with regard to his wife, a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person.She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis.She had arts of her own of exciting one's impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption that we were kind to her because we liked her.In reality her personal fall had been a sort of social rise--since I had seen the moment when, in our little conscientious circle, her desolation almost made her the fashion.
Her voice was grating and her children ugly; moreover she hated the good Mulvilles, whom I more and more loved.They were the people who by doing most for her husband had in the long run done most for herself; and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a pressure gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability.I'm bound to say he didn't criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary forms.She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society.She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she doubtless patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me.I dare say Ishould have got on with her better if she had had a ray of imagination--if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard Saltram's expressions of his nature in any other manner than as separate subjects of woe.They were all flowers of his character, pearls strung on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he HAD a character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation.One might doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a general licence for such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one's feeling that there could be none for such a woman.
I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an English-French or other phrase-book.She triumphed in what she told me and she may have triumphed still more in what she withheld.
My friend of the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately come to England; Lady Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years in consequence of her marriage with the late Sir Gregory of that name.She had a house in the Regent's Park, a Bath-chair and a fernery; and above all she had sympathy.Mrs.Saltram had made her acquaintance through mutual friends.This vagueness caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large an independent circle Mrs.Saltram had at her command.I should have been glad to know more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I should know most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have mysterious means of depriving me of my knowledge.For the present, moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact gone abroad accompanied by her niece.The niece, besides being immensely clever, was an heiress, Mrs.Saltram said; the only daughter and the light of the eyes of some great American merchant, a man, over there, of endless indulgences and dollars.She had pretty clothes and pretty manners, and she had, what was prettier still, the great thing of all.The great thing of all for Mrs.