The officer had thus ordained things. The white, plump arm of
Christine was imprisoned under his neck. He had ordered that too. He
was asleep. Christine watched him. On her return from the Albany she
had found him apparently just as she had left him, except that he
was much less talkative. Indeed, though unswervingly polite--even
punctilious with her--he had grown quite taciturn and very obstinate
and finicking in self-assertion. There was no detail as to which he
did not formulate a definite wish. Yet not until by chance her eye
fell on the whisky decanter did she perceive that in her absence
he had been copiously drinking again. He was not, however, drunk.
Remorseful at her defection, she constituted herself his slave; she
covered him with acquiescences; she drank his tippler's breath. And he
was not particularly responsive. He had all his own ideas. He ought,
for example, to have been hungry, but his idea was that he was not
hungry; therefore he had refused her dishes.
She knew him better now. Save on one subject, discussed in the
afternoon, he was a dull, narrow, direct man, especially in love. He
had no fancy, no humour, no resilience. Possibly he worshipped women,
as he had said, perhaps devoutly; but his worship of the individual
girl tended more to ritualism than to ecstasy.
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