"There," he announced, "if you'll be content with just ordinary paper you ought to be able to get a thousand for——"
The door opened suddenly and The Kitten came in. She stood quite still, while Herrick sat motionless, the pencil poised over the paper, his lips parted on the word. Every drop of color left his face and then rushed back in a deep red that swelled the veins of his neck and congested his eyes. He rose heavily and the pencil rolled away under the table.
The Kitten closed the door and came toward the table. A few feet away she stopped. Jean noticed mechanically the scarlet of her mouth in the dead whiteness of her face. It was like a wound, and when she spoke her voice was high and cutting, like the crackling of tin that had torn the wound.
"So this is why you lied?" She looked at Herrick and Jean's eyes followed. His flushed face was heavy and ugly, and he looked unspeakably foolish, staring back with his lips parted. Jean thought of her father, standing in the bar of sunlight, and of her mother shrinking from him. In a strange, unreal calm, she thought how odd it was that she should have the same picture of her father and her husband.
She rose, with a detached feeling of not belonging here and at the same time of being called on to do something, perform some unpleasant social duty, that should have fallen to the lot of the hostess, who wasn't herself at all.
"We've just finished dinner," she said quietly, "and there's not a thing left. But I can make you some coffee."
The Kitten turned from Herrick and looked at her directly. The heavy lids lowered and her eyes went slowly from the crown of Jean's head to her feet, in a look that drew Jean's body after it into the mire.
Jean stepped back quickly. There was no pretense or misunderstanding now.
The Kitten grinned. "Didn't you know it, really? I was always sure you guessed. It's been such a long time before you—even."
Clearest of all the thoughts whirling in Jean's brain was the knowledge that she felt no anger, nor was she stunned. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no slightest doubt in her. Instead, there was a kind of relief, grotesque but real, and as if she had discovered at last the source of some annoyance that had long puzzled her. Her brain seemed to be running in layers, streams of thought all perfectly distinct. One layer was concerned with herself and Herrick, from the first night they had eaten with The Bunch and The Kitten had stared so rudely across the table. Her first vivid picture of The Kitten had been across a table and now she was seeing her again across a table. And another stream bore Herrick apart from The Bunch, alone with her in the days before their marriage, and the things she had believed and the things that had really been true. There was a stream for Herrick and herself running through the last eighteen months, with all sorts of landmarks coming to the surface. And there was the stream of her own present calm, with the feeling that it was impossible that she should feel this way, that it must be a false strength which would fail in a moment and leave her at the mercy of this woman with the white face and the scarlet mouth and the malicious eyes under their lowered lids.