Sometime after her husband’s return, when he left with a heavy heart, while feeling palpably excited, she felt vaguely miserable. That night as she relived those enlivening moments, brought about by her uncharacteristic behaviour, she realized that she was in love with him. Though she was amused at that, yet she suffered from chasm of qualms over her conduct as a married woman. Shocked at the prospect of a liaison, she resolved to use all her moral strength not to let her love sway over her fidelity.
‘Didn’t I want to nip his infatuation in the bud by warning him that it would be inimical to his marriage as well?’ she began to reconstruct that night’s chain of thoughts. ‘Why, I was certain that he would tuck his tail and run, leaving me alone to overcome my vacillation. How eagerly I waited for his call to unburden his burdensome love, but then, how cleverly he foiled my plan! Didn’t he say that his wife was pragmatic as well as practical althrough, and now that he had crossed sixty and she was well past fifty, he was certain that she was bound to turn a blind eye to our autumn love? Why couldn’t I prepare a counter for that? Didn’t I, on the other hand, love his mischievous speculation that his wife might even welcome our healthy adultery? What an audacity? So to say, didn’t he pulverize my resistance to his courting that was so joyous any way? How thrilling it was to be nicknamed Sexy-Ms and, how titillating were those prolonged telephonic conversations that followed! Oh, how his recollections of my sly exposures became music to my ears to lift my spirits!’
Thereafter, deluding herself about the innocence of her harmless romance, she came to abandon herself on the flirtatious path. Soon, however, as he tried to press her into a liaison, she panicked no end, and at the next turn, she stunned him with an ‘I told my husband’ lie and he hung up in dismay with her ‘below the belt’ hit.
‘Didn’t he say it is one thing to lead a man up the garden path and another to push him into an abyss of shame?’ presently she began recalling his words tearfully. ‘Though he was dying for her possession, yet he could live without her love but it was hard for him to live with the thought that she belittled it before her husband.’
She always wondered why his sense of hurt didn’t dent her senseless fidelity then and there! She was shocked at his loss but felt relieved as well for the breakup put her back on the familiar track of unwavering fidelity. But, soon, as she began missing him even in the precincts of the temples, she strengthened her resolve with a sense of triumph over the devil of infidelity. So she tried to put the vacillations of her mind behind to put her life back on the sedative course. However, her sense of guilt for having unfairly hurt him never left her. Besides, as her husband’s ‘ever on the raise’ cussedness only helped increase her sense of alienation from him, she began to see the futility of fidelity itself. As that insensibly tipped the scale of her life towards the autumn of love, she sent him that belated invitation for union.