Explore "Forget-me-not" by Marjorie Bowen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Custom reasserted itself, and every day life dropped into it usual routine, but now between Madame du Boccage and the governess it was open warfare, waged with that tenacity which only those whose passion is fully roused have the strength to maintain. Not one spark of pity did Lucille Debelleyme feel for the woman whom she now regarded as a rival. Did she not employ her servant to spy upon her husband?--did she not listen eagerly to tales that anyone brought to her of him? And what if not rejected love was the root of all her miseries and anguish?
Lucille Debelleyme did not put a very high value on that passion; she knew the world would call it a pure wifely affection, a mere insistence on sacred vows taken before God; but, looked at clearly, what was it? A physical desire for a man whose character she could not admire if she was the virtuous woman she pretended to be, a man whose actions she must, as a good mother, despise, a man she should, if she were sincere in her pious protestations, condemn as an atheist, a libertine, a heartless rake.