Had I never seen in Philip McAllister’s eyes the fanaticism of a Puritan? Had I never noticed how, at a dinner party, his flushed face did not turn when he spoke to someone but was kept tensely in an attitude that allowed him to keep a constant vigil on his wife, as if he were trying to read the thoughts in her deceitful head, or as if he wished to convey to her some message that would inform her he knew everything and forgave her nothing? Oh, to be sure, most people took this as a look of love. Indeed, the sole criticism of him was that he prolonged beyond the point of decency, his look of nuptial rapture and the vagueness which rendered him, in conversation, slightly stupid.

It was true, as the Countess said, that in public his eyes, across the cerulean azure of which there passed a flare of hotter blue like the quick, staggering stab of sun to the heart of a diamond, never left his wife but studied her as the rapt jeweler studies a rare stone through the little magnifying glass enfolded in his eye. And while he watched her, he praised her to everyone within earshot: no one had her genius for dress, or her hair, or her enchanting voice in a high minor key, or had that pearly shining flesh in which only the mouth, the palest pink or, in some lights, faint lilac, broke the lily-like monotony. In these first months of her pregnancy when it had not yet made itself cumbersome, she had reached the pinnacle of her loveliness, like the forced flower, blossoming under glass and out of reach of the distractions of other flowers and the alteration of its color by the sun or by the shade. No less embarrassed than her guests was Hopestill whose protests only made her husband the more extravagant, the more hysterically flattering: “And her greatest charm of all is that she doesn’t know how charming she is!” he would cry.

I told the Countess that I did not quite see the logic of her argument: if Philip was aware that he had been tricked, and if, as she maintained, he was a throw-back to early Puritanism, why did he not divorce her or punish her by depriving her of all society, or, at the very least, refuse to have Morgan in his house?

“Oh, don’t think he wants anyone to know. He wants them to suspect, probably. But he can’t punish her openly, can’t divorce her—for I have no doubt he feels strongly about divorce—can’t burn a scarlet letter in her forehead. Darling, unconsciously he’s imitating Dante: Don’t you remember that the lovers’ punishment is to embrace forever?”