Dinah sank into a chair and fell to examining the hue and texture of the ribbon, curiosity, for the moment, out-balancing cold repugnance. It was of foreign make, she saw; a relic, doubtless, of those days when two people, who might have suited each other, used to meet, to exchange furtive whispers in a Paris salon; a memento sufficiently precious to have survived through a decade of divided years, and to become the object of a keenly contested wager between them now.
‘Tell your husband,’ with fresh purport Linda’s message returned to her, ‘that he has won, and I am bankrupt.’
She put back the enclosures in their cover, not suffering herself to smell the flowers’ languid odour, or look again on the one word whose import her jealousy divined and magnified. Then, just as she had hidden the letter away in a secret drawer of her dressing-case, the first dinner-bell was set ringing, and Dinah bethought her that, if she would carry out Gaston’s parting request, she must go into the dining-room, alone.
No further shirking of that ‘alone’ was practicable. On former occasions she had quietly contrived to absent herself from the public table when Gaston dined abroad, pleading headaches for heartaches, preferring tea to food, ringing the changes by which neglected wives, when they have common sense, keep their own sad counsel apart from the world. The time was past for deceits now, either towards herself, or others. Dinner, to-day, like all her future dinners, for twenty or thirty years, say, must, perforce, be eaten without Gaston.
To drift—here, in truth, seemed that which lay before her! To drift! At the present moment to speculate on possible effects—to vacillate over a tucker, a locket, the colour of one’s dinner dress. A despairing human soul, perplexed over the rival merits of pink, white, or blue; a soul which, when love shone on it, had less than its feminine share of toilet vanity! As poor Dinah hesitated, her thoughts travelled back, by no road she knew, to Saturday’s rose-show, her first meeting with Rex Basire, her earliest distinct doubt of Gaston’s truthfulness. She decided to put on the black dress she wore that day, to pin a white rose, Gaston’s flower by predilection, in her hair, to wear a silver bracelet, Gaston’s first present after their marriage, on her wrist.
How fair, how marvellously fair she was! The fact struck Dinah with a sense of newness as she stood, waiting for the last dinner-bell, before her glass. Surely her looks, joined to such lavish love as she had given, might have contented the heart, the pride of the most exacting husband. If she had only had more mind. There was the flaw, the fatal deficiency to a man with whom mind was all in all, like Gaston Arbuthnot.
She scrutinised the moulding of her temples, the lines of her perfectly cut head. In outward proportion she thought there was not much amiss. It must be the quality of the brain that was poor. There must be an inherited peasant slowness, a bluntness of perception or wit, something which disabled her from holding her own against the taught graces, the pliant, inexhaustible lightness of such an one as Linda Thorne. She might, if lowlier duties had fallen to her, have been clever enough to manage a house, to look after her husband’s interests, to bring up children. Amongst ladies and gentlemen—oh, the bitterness with which she uttered the titles of gentility half aloud—amongst ladies and gentlemen she had no place, no chance.
And in her nature, not thoroughly sounded as yet, but of whose depths the last few days had vaguely informed her—in her innermost nature were evil things that a constant pressure of temptation might bring to the surface. She was not like Geoffrey. No ministering to others could fill her life, at any rate not while she was young, while the cry for love had the double keenness of a physical and of a moral want. If she continued a hanger-on of the world that Gaston loved,—‘some one who must be asked, don’t you know, occasionally, on sufferance,’—she would, one day, meet with homage, differently offered, and from a different man to Rex Basire. Was she sure that gratitude would not be awakened in her, then vanity? Was she sure she might not decline, step by step, to the condition of that most pitiable among women—a wife, true to the cold letter of her fealty, who has at once outlived her husband’s affection and the stings of her own self-contempt?
Dinah started, guiltily, as the sharp clang of the dinner-bell roused her into final action. It took a good many minutes before she could recover sufficiently to face the ordeal that lay before her. At last, arming herself by the reflection that henceforth all life’s common actions must be gone through alone, and under a certain cloud of suspicion, she made her way to the dining-room. After a moment’s trembling heartsickness, she pushed back one of the double doors—entered.