“It’ll be a difficult thing for me to explain matters about the letter,” said Selwood, ruefully. “The fellow is sure to scout the idea of a mistake. However, there’s no help for it. I must explain, and that, too, at the earliest opportunity.”
Tact is not, as a rule, a feminine characteristic, but Hilda Selwood possessed a larger share of it than many women with considerably the advantage over herself in training and general knowledge of the world. She began as she had said by literally “sounding” Violet. But there was something in the latter’s manner which seemed to show that the news of Sellon’s previous appropriation was no news to her at all—in fact, that she had known it all along. Finally she admitted as much, and rather gloried in it.
Then ensued a tolerably lively scene. What if he was chained to a fiend of a woman whose sole end and object had always been to make life a burden to him? burst forth Violet, with livid face and flashing eyes. The creature would die some day, it was to be hoped, and then ten thousand heavens were as nothing to the happiness before them both. Give him up? Not she! She would rather die a thousand times over, and would do so first. She was his real wife in the sight of God, she declared, as the stock blasphemous balderdash runs, whatever the other woman was in name, and so forth. Rebuke, reason, appeals to pride, to self-respect were all alike in vain before this furious outburst of uncontrollable passion. The girl seemed possessed of a very demon. She hurled reproaches at her hostess and friend, taxing her with playing the spy upon her—conspiracy, amateur detective business, everything—and declared she would sooner sleep in the veldt than pass another night under that roof. Finally she went off into a fit of shrieking, violent hysterics, and in this condition articulated things that set Hilda Selwood’s ears tingling with outraged disgust.
“The most painfully shocking scene I ever witnessed in my life, and I hope and trust I never may again,” was the latter’s comment to her husband some time afterwards.
“And the curious part of it is I can’t for the life of me make out what the deuce she can see in the fellow,” had been Christopher’s rejoinder. “He’s not much to look at, and although he’s good company in a general way, I don’t think his brain-box holds a very close fit.”
A common enough speculation, and one which must ever remain in the category of things speculative. “What the deuce can she see in the fellow?” Who is to say?