She was walking away from him, but turned again. “If you mean by that that you put the responsibility for your abominable life on me––”
“Abominable life! Me! Just because I’m not one of the white-blooded Nancies which your aunt thinks the only ones fit to be called men––”
But he couldn’t go on. He was choking. The sole relief to his indignation was in once more tearing round the room, while Miss Walbrook moved to the fluted white mantelpiece, where, with her foot resting on the attenuated Hunt Diedrich andirons she bowed her head against an attenuated Hunt Diedrich antelope in bronze.
She was not softened or repentant. She knew she would become so later; but she knew too that her tempers had to work themselves off by degrees. Their 10 quarrels having hitherto been rendered worth while by their reconciliations, she took it for granted that the same thing would happen once more though, as she expressed it to herself, she would have died before taking the first step. The obvious thing was for him to pick up the ring from off the floor, bring it to her humbly while her back was turned on him, and beseech her to allow him to slip it on where it belonged; whereupon she would consider as to whether she would do so or not. In her present frame of mind, so she told herself, she would not. Nothing would induce her to do anything of the kind. He had betrayed the fact that he knew something as to which she was desperately sensitive, which other people knew, but which she had always supposed to have escaped his observation—that she was like an old maid.
She was. She was only twenty-five, but she had been like an old maid at fifteen. It had been a joke till she was twenty, after which it had continued as a joke to her friends, but a grief to herself. She was distinguished, aristocratic, intellectual, accomplished, and Aunt Marion would probably see to it that she was left tolerably well off; nevertheless she had picked up from her aunt, or perhaps had inherited from the same source, the peculiar quality of the woman who would probably not marry. Because she knew it and bewailed it, it had come like a staggering blow to learn that Rash knew it, and perhaps bewailed it too. The least he could do to atone for that offense would be to beg her, to implore her on his bended knees, to wear his ring again; and she might not do it even then.
The dramatic experience was worth waiting for, 11 however, and so with spirit churning she leaned her hot brow against the thin, cool flank of Hunt Diedrich’s antelope. She knew by the fierce grinding of his steps on the far side of the room that he hadn’t yet picked up the ring; but there was no hurry as to that. Since she would never, never forgive him for knowing what she thought he didn’t know—forgive him in her heart, that was to say—not if she married him ten times over, or to the longest day he lived, there was plenty of time for reaching friendly terms again. Her anger had not yet blown off, nor had she stabbed him hard enough. As with most people subject to storms of hot temper, stabs, given and received, were all in her day’s work. They relieved for the moment the pressure of emotion, leaving no permanent ill-will behind them.
She heard him come to a halt, but did not turn to look at him.
“So it’s all over!”
As a peg on which to hang a retort the words would serve as well as any others. “It seems so, doesn’t it?”
“And you don’t care whether I go to the devil or not?”