“I was shopping on the avenue yesterday, and I saw you and my husband in a cab. I immediately hailed another and—followed you!” Marjorie felt the blood mounting to her cheeks, and she turned her head in order to conceal her embarrassment as she brought this bit of strategy into play. “So you see there isn’t any use for you to deny it.”
“So that’s it.” Geraldine DeLacy threw away her cigarette and faced her accuser defiantly. “Well, there isn’t anything for me to deny. I called at Mr. Benton’s office on business. He is a broker and attending to some of my affairs—surely I have a right to employ his services. It happened to be lunch time and he invited me to go with him. I must confess that I am surprised to think that the honorable Mrs. Benton has stooped to spying.”
Marjorie was struggling for calmness.
“I’d do more than that, Mrs. DeLacy,” she said, with feverish meaning. “I’d fight to the bitter end for the man I love.”
“You love?” Geraldine’s laugh ended in a sneer. “Why, you don’t know what love means—you, with your haughty air of superiority—your repellent coldness. What can you mean to any man—particularly a man like Hugh Benton?”
Marjorie faced her proudly: “Something that no other woman in the world means—I am the mother of his children.”
Geraldine coolly lighted another cigarette. She seemed to be considering. “When two people reach the climax in their lives, when they mean as little to one another as you two,” she commented insultingly, “then even children do not count.”
“What do you know concerning our lives?”
Geraldine’s shrug was expressive, and she half yawned in a bored manner.
“What everybody else knows,” she enlightened, “that you are mismated—that you haven’t an idea in common—that your husband believes in living while you have stayed at home—and—well,—” She eyed her rival insolently from head to foot,—“have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror? When Hugh Benton told me he was four years your senior I wouldn’t believe it. You’re more like his mother. Why, you’re forty years old, Marjorie Benton, and I’m thirty-six—yes—I know I tell everybody I’m twenty-six (I’ve been taken for twenty-three) that’s the difference between us. I’m being brutally frank with you because I want to show you how impossible it is for you to hold your husband.”