"Ah." The light died out of Edith's eyes. "Honestly, I wish it could be Louisa, but I doubt it. Why should she?"
"Might she really have been having an affair with the general, and he threw her over - told her it was all finished? You said she was not a woman to take rejection lightly."
Edith's face reflected a curious mixture of emotions: amusement in her eyes, sadness in her mouth, even a shadow of guilt.
"You never knew Thaddeus, or you wouldn't seriously think of such a thing. He was ..." She hesitated, her mind reaching for ideas and framing them into words. "He was . . . remote. Whatever passion there was in him was private, and chilly, not something to be shared. I never saw him deeply moved by anything."
A quick smile touched her mouth, imagination, pity and regret in it. "Except stories of heroism, loyalty and sacrifice. I remember him reading 'Sohrab and Rustum' when it was first published four years ago." She glanced at Hester and saw her incomprehension. "It's a tragic poem by Arnold." The smile returned, bleak and sad."It's a complicated story; the point is they are father and son, both great military heroes, and they kill each other without knowing who they are, because they have wound up on opposite sides in a war. It's very moving."
"And Thaddeus liked it?"
"And the stories of the great heroes of the past - ours and other people's. The Spartans combing their hair before Thermopylae - they all died, you know, three hundred of them, but they saved Greece. And Horatius on the bridge ..."
"Iknow," Hester said quickly. "Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' I begin to understand. There were the passions he could identify with: honor, duty, courage, loyalty - not bad things. I'm sorry ..."
Edith gave her a look of sudden warmth. It was the first time they had spoken of Thaddeus as a person they could care about rather than merely as the center of a tragedy. "But I think he was a man of thought rather than feeling," she went on, returning to the business of it. "Usually he was very controlled, very civilized. I suppose in some ways he was not unlike Mama. He had an absolute commitment to what is right, and I never knew him to step outside it - in his speech or his acts."
She screwed up her face and shook her head a little. "If he had some secret passion for Louisa he hid it completely, and honestly I cannot imagine him so involved in it as to indulge himself in what he would consider a betrayal, not so much of Alexandra as of himself. You .see, to him adultery would be wrong, against the sanctity of home and the values by which he lived. None of his heroes would do such a thing. It would be unimaginable."
She lifted her shoulders high in an exaggerated shrug. "But suppose if he had, and then grown tired of her, or had an attack of conscience. I really believe that Louisa - whom I don't much care for, but I must be honest, I think is quite clever enough to have seen it coming long before he said anything - would have preempted him by leaving him herself. She would choose to be the one to end it; she would never allow him to."
"But if she loved him?" Hester pressed. "And some women do love the unattainable with a passion they never achieve for what is in their reach. Might she not be reluctant to believe he would never respond - and care so much she would rather kill him than ..."
Edith laughed jerkily. "Oh Hester. Don't be absurd! What a romantic you are. You live in a world of grand passions, undying love and devotion, and burning jealousy. Neither of them were remotely like that. Thaddeus was heroic, but he was also pompous, stuffy, very rigid in his views, and cold to talk to. One cannot always be reading epic poetry, you know. Most of the time he was a guarded, ungiving man. And Louisa is passionate only about herself. She likes to be loved, admired, envied - especially envied - and to be comfortable, to be the center of everyone's attention. She would never put involvement with anyone else before her own self-image. Added to that, she dresses gorgeously, parades around and flirts with her eyes, but Maxim is