“You are not coming back,” she quietly explained.
Already, she knew, all the doors of all the world were closed between them. The thing seemed so final, so irrefutably over and done with, that there was even a spurning touch of weariness in her tone. But he refused to be spurned.
“I am coming back,” he maintained, facing the eyes which refused to meet his, speaking more violently than he had at first intended to speak. “I am coming back again, as sure as that sun is shining on those housetops out there. I’m coming back, and I’m going to take you in my arms again. For I’m going to tame you, you crazy-hearted little stormy petrel, even though I have to break down that door of yours, and break down that pride of yours, to do it!”
She went whiter than ever as she stood there with her hand on the door-knob. She stood there for what seemed a very long time.
“To-morrow at three,” she repeated in her dead voice, with just the faintest trace of a shiver shaking her huddled figure. It was not altogether a question; it was not altogether an answer.
But it was enough for Uhlan, who passed with a dignity not untouched with triumph out through the open door. Yet Teddie’s shiver, as she stood staring after him, was the thoracic râle of her youth. And down on her protesting body, for the first time in her life, pressed a big flanged instrument with indented surfaces, like a pair of iron jaws from which she could not entirely free herself.
CHAPTER SIX
Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, confronted by the first entirely sleepless night of her career, hugged her wounded pride to her breast and went pioneering. She lay on her narrow bed blazing new trails of thought. She turned and twisted and waited for morning, as torn in spirit as a Belgian villager over whom the iron hooves of war had trampled. For she found herself a victim of strange and violent reactions and her body a small but seething cauldron of bitterness.
The more she thought of Raoul Uhlan and his affront to her the more she hated him. The scene in her studio began to take on the distorted outlines of a nightmare, merging into something as disquieting as remembered dreams of being denuded. Even when the ordained reactions of nature demanded lassitude after tempest she found the incandescent coals of her hatred fanned by the thought of her helplessness. For it was for more than the mere indignities to her person that she hated the man. She hated him for crushing down with an over-brutal heel the egg-shell dream of her emancipation. She hated him for defiling her peace of mind, for undermining her faith in a care-free world which she had fought so hard to attain. He had done more than hurt her pride; he had shaken her temple of art down about her ears.
Teddie began to see, as she felt seismic undulations in what she had so foolishly accepted as bed-rock, that her home-life had perhaps stood for more than she imagined. It had meant not an accidental but an elaborately sustained dignity, a harboring seclusion, an achieved though cluttered-up spaciousness where the wheels of existence revolved on bearings so polished that one was apt to forget their power. And all this took her thoughts on to Ruby Reamer, the businesslike young girl of the studios from whom, without quite realizing it, she had learned so much. Beside the worldly-wise and sophisticated Ruby, Teddie remembered, she had more than once felt like a petted and pampered and slightly over-fed Pomeranian beside a quick-witted street-wanderer who’d only too early learned to forage for a living. And the question as to what Ruby might do in any such contingency led her to a calmer and colder assessment of her own resources.