"My pride!" retorted Finetta. "Ah, you can talk like that, you who don't know what I feel! I haven't any. I'd have followed him round the world like a dog, grateful for a kind word—or a blow! I'd have worked for him like a slave. Poor! He needn't have been poor if he'd married me. He should have had every penny, and I'd have been content to go in rags so long as he had the best of everything; and I'd have made him happy, or die in the trying."
"You'd most likely have died," remarked Polly, with a woman's insight.
"I dare say. Well, I could have died. But it's all over."
She hid her face in her hands and shook like a leaf for a full minute, then suddenly her mood changed, and she started up—in a fury.
The tears dried up in her burning eyes, her face became white, her lips rigid; and as she stood with clenched hands and heaving bosom she looked like an outraged goddess, a tigress robbed of her cub, a woman despised and deserted—and that is a more terrible thing than the outraged goddess or the bereaved tigress, by the way.
"He's a fool!" she panted. "A fool! To leave me for such as her! Says she's pretty!" She strode to the glass and stood erect before it. "Is she better looking than I am? I don't believe it. And what else is she? Nothing. She's poor—she isn't a swell even. And he's left me and that other, that Lady Eleanor, for her! Yes; I could have borne it better if it had been Lady Eleanor; if it had been one of her sort it would be more natural; but a mere nobody, the daughter of an artist!"
In her ignorance poor Finetta regarded the painters of pictures and gate posts as equals.
"A common painter! Why, he'd better have married me!" and she drew a long breath. "I'm as good as she is, and she'll be a lady. I'd make as good a lady as she would."
"You never saw her," ventured Polly, timidly.
The tigress swung round upon her, dashing the wine glasses to the ground in the movement.