Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/199

Rh were ready to show her the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was too much the wife—and the wife in love—to consent that her husband’s views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded. Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention, she felt bound—if only in defense of her illusions—to maintain and emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the ofﬁcial “platform” on which she had married: Amherst’s devoted role at Westmore had justiﬁed the unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed—the more helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the question—to the policy of conciliating the opposing inﬂuences which had so uncomfortably chosen to ﬁght out their case on the ﬁeld of her poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife’s inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month to month the ﬁnal question of the [ 183 ]