He was not an artist and Mary Warton cared more for art than for anything in the world.
It was a matter on which she could not compromise.
It blinded her to the fact that the faults in Warton that maddened her were due in large part to his hurt feelings.
She wounded him continually and he was dogmatic and intolerant in self-protection.
There cannot be anything much worse than to be despised by the one person whose approval is all in all to you; and though Thomas Warton was intolerable it was impossible not to feel sorry for him.
But if I have given the impression that Mary was a discontented, rather tiresome, pretentious woman I have been unjust to her.
She was a loyal friend and a delightful companion.
You could talk to her of any subject under the sun.
Her conversation was humorous and witty.
Her vitality was immense.
She was sitting now on the left hand of her host and the talk around her was general.
I was occupied with my next-door neighbour, but I guessed by the laughter with which Mary’s sallies were greeted that she was at her brilliant best.
When she was in the vein no one could approach her.
“You’re in great form tonight,” I remarked, when at last she turned to me.
“Does it surprise you?”
“No, it’s what I expect of you.
No wonder people tumble over one another to get you to their houses.
You have the inestimable gift of making a party go.”
“I do my little best to earn my dinner.”
“By the way, how’s Manson?
Someone told me the other day that he was going into a nursing-home for an operation.
I hope it’s nothing serious.”
Mary paused for a moment before answering, but she still smiled brightly.
“Haven’t you seen the paper tonight?”
“No, I’ve been playing golf.
I only got home in time to jump into a bath and change.”
“He died at two o’clock this afternoon.” I was about to make an exclamation of horrified surprise, but she stopped me. “Take care.
Tom is watching me like a lynx.
They’re all watching me.
They all know I adored him, but they none of them know for certain if he was my lover, even Tom doesn’t know; they want to see how I’m taking it.
Try to look as if you were talking of the Russian Ballet.”
At that moment someone addressed her from the other side of the table, and throwing back her head a little with a gesture that was habitual with her, a smile on her large mouth, she flung at the speaker so quick and apt an answer that everyone round her burst out laughing.
The talk once more became general and I was left to my consternation.
I knew, everyone knew, that for five and twenty years there had existed between Gerrard Manson and Mary Warton a passionate attachment.
It had lasted so long that even the more strait-laced of their friends, if ever they had been shocked by it, had long since learnt to accept it with tolerance.
They were middle-aged people, Manson was sixty and Mary not much younger, and it was absurd that at their age they should not do what they liked.
You met them sometimes sitting in a retired corner of an obscure restaurant or walking together in the Zoo and you wondered why they still took care to conceal an affair that was nobody’s business but their own.
But of course there was Thomas.
He was insanely jealous of Mary.
He made many violent scenes and indeed, at the end of one tempestuous period, not so very long ago, he forced her to promise never to see Manson again.
Of course she broke the promise, and though she knew that Thomas suspected this, she took precautions to prevent him from discovering it for a fact.
It was hard on Thomas.
I think he and Mary would have jogged on well enough together and she would have resigned herself to the fact that he was a second-rate painter if her intercourse with Manson had not embittered her judgement.
The contrast between her husband’s mediocrity and her lover’s brilliance was too galling.
“With Tom I feel as if I were stifling in a closed room full of dusty knick-knacks,” she told me. “With Gerrard I breathe the pure air of the mountain tops.”
“Is it possible for a woman to fall in love with a man’s mind?” I asked in a pure spirit of inquiry.
“What else is there in Gerrard?”
That, I admit, was a poser.
For my part I thought, nothing; but the sex is extraordinary and I was quite ready to believe that Mary saw in Gerrard Manson a charm and a physical attractiveness to which most people were blind.
He was a shrivelled little man, with a pale intellectual face, faded blue eyes behind his spectacles, and a high dome of shiny bald head.