He scoffed.
I decided not to belabor this point, but it seemed to me that the effort it took for me to do something that was supposed to be simple—dancing with a stranger at a dance or something of that nature—was much higher than it was for everyone else, and that it took more out of me.
“Anyway, I have not come to scold you,” he said. “I have come to reassure you that I am no threat to you. I would never do such a thing, no matter how I felt, Will, and you ought to know that of me.”
I supposed I did know it. “I apologize. It was not fair of me to accuse you, even if I only did it in my mind.”
“I find, in situations such as this, it is not the behavior of the man in question, anyway. It is something else. Something in the relationship has gone wrong, and it makes it easy to look about for trouble. The easy trouble to find is another man, because one can do something about that trouble. Just challenge it to a duel. Problem solved.”
“I would never challenge anyone to a—”
“Anyway, it’s almost never the problem,” said Richard.
“Who have you been dueling over?” I said. “You have never, to my knowledge, so much as courted a woman.”
“Oh, Will, this is not the point.”
“What, then, you’re that attached to your affairs with opera singers, is that it?”
“She was an actress,” said Richard tightly, “and I won’t have you mocking it. She was…” He sighed, scratching his forehead. “Look, trust me when I say it’s never another man that is the root of the problem. Women do not seek other men when they are happy with the one they have. If she is looking elsewhere, something has already gone wrong.”
I stopped walking at that, halted by what he had said. Yes, he was right.
He stopped walking, too. “So, then, that arrow struck true? What has gone wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I’m not sure anything in this marriage of ours has gone right.”
“Why did you marry her? She’s lovely and rather your perfect match, I think, and if you tell me it’s that, that you fell madly in love, I shall accept it, but it doesn’t sound like you, truly.”
I started walking again. “It was all complicated. Everyone thought I compromised her—”
“Yes, I heard that rumor, and I knew it was not true. You would never elope.”
“Well, precisely,” I said.
“Nor would you jilt a woman if she had hurt her ankle,” said Richard. “I couldn’t even understand that. What man would?”
“Well, the point was simply that she was a great deal more trouble to elope with if she had a hurt ankle is all. There are men who would rethink it all at that juncture.”
“I suppose,” said Richard. “So, then I heard the thing about the house.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Ah,” he said.
“So, the rumors were spreading, and there was damage to her family’s reputation, and her father has no heir, and there are five daughters and…”
“You rescued her, yes, I see that. That is something you would do.”
“It was no rescue. She was not inclined to be rescued.”
“Oh, well, that is good, however! Because you have no worry that she is only pretending to like you because of what you did for her.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling. “Yes, of course.”
“What is the trouble in the marriage?”
“It is this,” I said, gesturing with both hands. “The fact she is not proper, that she is not accepted, that she is not the sort of woman I should have married.”
