Her face was composed and
proud. There was not a signal out, even from her brilliant expressive eyes,
of the storm within.
Her mind was no longer stunned. It was seething with disgust and fury. How
dared he? Her own, her exclusive property, inherited and separate....She
felt at this moment exactly as she would have felt if her jewel coffer
instead of the dispatch box had been rifled; it was the instinct of
possession that had been outraged. What was hers was hers as much as the
hair on her head or the thoughts in her mind...an instinct that harked back
to the oldest of the buried civilizations...she wondered if any socialist
really had cultivated the power to feel differently. She was quite certain
that if Kirkpatrick should see a thief fleeing with his purse he would
chase him, collar him, and either chastise him then and there or drag him
to the nearest police station.
And the thief was her husband, the man of her choice. Alexina felt that
possibly if a brother had stolen her money she would have been less bitter
because less humiliated; one did not select one's brothers....And if she
had still loved Mortimer it would have been bad enough, although no doubt
with the blindness of youthful passion she would immediately have begun to
make excuses for him, reeling a blow as it would have been. But the one
compensation she had found in her matrimonial wilderness was her pride in
the essential honor of her chosen partner, and her complete trust.
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