“He has no reason to think anything else, has he?” said Mollie, and I saw that I had brought her to the point to which I had intended to bring her. “I don’t let him guess that I’m not happy; it would be horrid of me if I did, for it would only mean that he’d feel at once that we must go away, and all this loveliness would be over for him. A stuffy little flat in Bayswater isn’t a very alluring alternative; and that’s where we’d have to go—to my aunt’s—till Clive was better.”
“How you’d love the stuffy flat! How glad you’d be to be there with him! And, to do him justice, how happy he’d be there with you! He will be in a month’s time. The only question is, the month. No, Vera isn’t an angel. If she were an angel, she’d have seen to it that you were happy here, too. But when it comes to being nice to other women,—really nice, I mean,—she can be a cat. And what I’d like very much to see now is what she’d make of it if you could show her that you could look like an angel, too. It’s so much a matter of looks.”
“Make of it? But I couldn’t look like an angel.”
“You could look like a rival; that’s another way of doing it. You could look like another woman of her own sort. You could make her see you. She simply doesn’t see you now. I suspect that if Vera saw you and saw that you were charming, she’d show her claws. I’d like Captain Thornton to see her showing her claws.”
In silent astonishment, her blue eyes fixed upon me, Mollie gazed.
“No, I don’t hate Vera, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said. “I like you, that’s all, and I don’t intend that she shall go on making you unhappy.”
“But I don’t want Clive made unhappy,” Mollie said. “I can’t imagine what you mean; but, whatever it is, I don’t want it. I couldn’t bear all this to be spoiled for him. I couldn’t bear it not to be always, for him, a paradise.”
It was my turn to gaze at her, and I gazed penetratingly.
“And what if it all came to mean that you yourself, because of it, were never to be more to him than a second-rate paradise? What if she were to spoil you for him?”
I brought out the cruel questions deliberately, and for a moment Mollie faced them and me.