Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/279

Rh room anecdotes did not amuse him, he was unmoved by the ﬂuctuations of the stock—market, he could not tell one card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards had once caused Mr. Langhope to murmur, in his daughter’s hearing: “Ah, that’s the test—I always said so!”

Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief points of contact with life, how could Amherst hope to impose himself on minds versed in these larger relations? As the sense of his social insufﬁciency grew on her, Bessy became more sensitive to that latent criticism of her marriage which—intolerable thought!—involved a judgment on herself. She was increasingly eager for the approval and applause of her little audience, yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and more miserably persuaded that she and her husband were the butt of some of their most effective stories. She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst’s conduct was the subject of unfriendly comment provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to his ideas.…

From this turmoil of conﬂicting inﬂuences only her friendship with Justine Brent remained secure. Though Justine’s adaptability made it easy for her to ﬁt into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be inﬂuenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses [ 263 ]