“No, truly, thank you,” Catherine replied, and hurried out.
Neither Stacey nor Marian moved, but their eyes met instantly. They gazed at each other in silence. Stacey’s heart beat heavily; he could feel the throb of it chokingly in his throat. Marian’s eyes were inscrutable, but her lips were shut closely in an expression of sullen anger.
At last he leaned forward. “Marian!” he said.
She did not reply, but her fine nostrils dilated slightly. There was another moment of silence.
“Are you happy?” he demanded brusquely.
“No!” The monosyllable seemed to spring forth without her volition. “You know I’m not, Stacey Carroll,” she added presently, with concentrated bitterness. “Why do you want to insult me?”
“I—don’t!” he replied, a sudden touch of pity softening his passion.
They were, in some strange, partial, imperfect manner, made for each other; for they caught each other’s emotions unerringly. The hostility went out of Marian’s face.
“I couldn’t have believed,” she said, after a moment, “that any one could be so unbearably stupid as Ames is, hour after hour, day after day.” Hatred flared up again in her eyes—but not hatred of Stacey this time, he knew. “And—brutal!” she added, between her teeth.
Stacey could follow her thoughts as clearly as though they had been small distorted goblins leaping up and vanishing in the air. The cult of her body,—Marian had always had it, refined upon it fastidiously. Not at all vain, she had been aloofly physically proud. What she had felt for her own body was precisely what her father felt for his Chinese vases. And now she had had to turn this one cherished possession over to a new and despised master. Stacey caught it all, not through such analysis, but in a swift intuitive glimpse. He writhed. “It’s all your fault, yours!” her eyes seemed to say to him. He sprang up.