Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/384

Rh more than soothe and restrain—to reason would have been idle. She had never till now realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.

“The humiliation—before my friends! Oh, I was warned … my father, every one … for Cicely’s sake I was warned … but I wouldn’t listen—and now! From the ﬁrst it was all he cared for—in Europe, even, he was always dragging me to factories. Me?—I was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted power—power, that’s all—when he lost it he left me … oh, I’m glad now my baby is dead! Glad there’s nothing between us—nothing, nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!”

The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a retaliatory hand—a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in the consequences of her unhappy marriage.

Such folly seemed past weeping for—it froze Justine’s compassion into disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy’s anger against her husband. [ 368 ]