Part 42 (1/2)
”I won't give up everything I like and that likes me,” she flung out.
”The War has done something to us all. It's made us let ourselves go.
It's done something to me too. It's made me less frightened. I won't be bullied into--into things.”
”Do I seem to bully you? I am sorry.”
The fact that she had let herself go with the rest of the world got the better of her.
”You have not been near me for weeks and now you turn up with your air of a grand Bashawe and order people out of my house. You have not been near me.”
The next instant it was as though she tore off some last shred of mental veiling and threw it aside in her reckless mounting heat of temper.
”Near me!” she laughed scathingly, ”For the matter of that when have you ever been _near_ me? It's always been the same. I've known it for years.
As the Yankees say, you 'wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole.' I'm sick of it. What did you _do_ it for?”
”Do what?”
”Take possession of me as if I were your property. You never were in love with me--never for a second. If you had been you'd have married me.”
”Yes. I should have married you.”
”There was no reason why you should not. I was pretty. I was young. I'd been decently brought up--and it would have settled everything. Why _didn't_ you instead of letting people think I was your mistress when I didn't count for as much as a straw in your life?”
”You represented more than that,” he answered. ”Kindly listen to me.”
That she had lost her head completely was sufficiently manifested by the fact that she had begun to cry--which made it necessary for her to use her handkerchief with inimitable skill to prevent the tears from encroaching on her brilliant white and rose.
”If you had been in love with me--” she chafed bitterly.
”On the morning some years ago when I came to you I made myself clear to the best of my ability,” he said. ”I did not mention love. I told you that I had no intention of marrying you. I called your attention to what the world would a.s.sume. I left the decision to you.”
”What could I do--without a penny? Some other man would have had to do it if you had not,” the letting go rushed her into saying.
”Or you would have been obliged to return to your parents in Jersey--which you refused to contemplate.”
”Of course I refused. It would have been mad to do it. And there were other people who would have paid my bills.”
”Solely because I knew that, I made my proposition. Being much older than you I realised that other people might not feel the responsibility binding--and permanent.”
She sat up and stared at him. There was no touch of the rancour of recrimination in his presentation of detached facts. He _was_ different from the rest. He was always better dressed and the perfection of his impersonal manner belonged to a world being swept away. He made Mr. Owen Delamore seem by contrast a bounder and an outsider. But the fact which had in the secret places of her small mind been the fly in her ointment--the one fact that he had never for a moment cared a straw for her--caused her actually to hate him as he again made it, quite without prejudice, crystal clear. It was true that he had more than kept his word--that he had never broken a convention in his bearing towards her--that in his rigid way he had behaved like a prince--but she had been dirt under his feet--she had been dirt under his feet! She wanted to rave like a fishwife--though there were no fishwives in Mayfair.
It was at this very moment of climax that a sudden memory beset her.
”Rob always said that if a woman who was pretty could see a man often enough--again and again--he couldn't _help_ himself--unless there _was_ some one else!”
Her last words were fiercely accusing. She quite glared at him a few seconds, her chest heaving pantingly.
She suddenly sprang from her sofa and dashed towards a table where a pile of photographs lay in an untidy little heap. She threw them about with angrily shaking hands until at last she caught at one and brought it back to him.
”There _was_ some one else,” she laughed shrilly. ”You were in love with that creature.”