Naturally Milly did not analyze closely her own troubled mind. Here was
plain evidence of her husband's being in which she no longer had the
smallest share. She had been slightly jealous, more than she would
admit, that other time at the beginning of the portrait because of
Jack's absorption in his subject and his work. Her egotism had been
wounded. But that was trifling compared with the present feeling. In
this completed creation she no more existed than the fly which rested
for a moment upon the painted canvas. His creation had nothing
whatsoever to do with her. And something deeper than egotism, far deeper
than jealousy, rose from the depths of her nature in antagonism--a
sex-antagonism to the whole affair. Her husband had a new mistress--not
necessarily the Russian woman, for that idea had not yet come to
her--but his Art. And he might follow this mistress whither she
beckoned,--to poverty, defeat, or victory,--unmindful of her and her
child, forgetting them like idle memories in the pursuit of his blind
purpose. It was a force inimical to her and antagonistic to all orderly
living, as the Hawaiian had said,--a demonic force which rises in the
midst of society to give the lie to all the pretences men make to
themselves and call "civilization."
Milly hated it, instinctively. Jack must paint no more such pictures for
love or for money, if their life were not to end in disaster. Did he
know what he had done with this Russian woman?... Where were they,
anyway?
She looked up at the silent _manoir_. The green blinds were drawn to
shut out the western sun. Milly knew the long, high room with its
timbered ceiling which Madame Saratoff had restored and furnished in
English style, and where, for the most part, she lived. The two were
there together now--she was sure of it. A new and fiercer emotion swept
Milly towards the house: she would discover them in their shame, in
their cruel selfishness. But she stopped on the stairs, suffocated by
her passion. She felt their presence just above her with a physical
sense of pain, but she lacked the strength to go forward. A terrible
sense of weakness in face of her defeat made her tremble. Her heart was
broken, she said; what mattered it now what they did. She had no doubts:
all was revealed as if she saw them in each other's arms. No man could
have discovered the secret of a woman's inmost being, if she had not
voluntarily yielded to him the key....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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