However, he had done with all that. He was well out of it. She had told him to go, and he had gone. She had money to get home; she had nothing to do but use the tongue in her head. The rest was her affair. He would go to Paris alone, and find another amusement. It was absurd to have supposed that Sophia would ever have suited him. Not in such a family as the Baineses could one reasonably expect to discover an ideal mistress. No! there had been a mistake. The whole business was wrong. She had nearly made a fool of him. But he was not the man to be made a fool of. He had kept his dignity intact.
So he said to himself. Yet all the time his dignity, and his pride also, were bleeding, dropping invisible blood along the length of the Strand pavements.
He was at Salisbury Street again. He pictured her in the bedroom. Damn her! He wanted her. He wanted her with an excessive desire. He hated to think that he had been baulked. He hated to think that she would remain immaculate. And he continued to picture her in the exciting privacy of that cursed bedroom.
Now he was walking down Salisbury Street. He did not wish to be walking down Salisbury Street; but there he was!
“Oh, hell!” he murmured. “I suppose I must go through with it.”
He felt desperate. He was ready to pay any price in order to be able to say to himself that he had accomplished what he had set his heart on.
“My wife hasn’t gone out, has she?” he asked of the hall-porter.
“I’m not sure, sir; I think not,” said the hall-porter.
The fear that Sophia had already departed made him sick. When he noticed her trunk still there, he took hope and ran upstairs.
He saw her, a dark crumpled, sinuous piece of humanity, half on and half off the bed, silhouetted against the bluish-white counterpane; her hat was on the floor, with the spotted veil trailing away from it. This sight seemed to him to be the most touching that he had ever seen, though her face was hidden. He forgot everything except the deep and strange emotion which affected him. He approached the bed. She did not stir.