He winced sharply. She had really hurt him there. He despised people who went sweetly through the world doing good to others; which was what she meant. Stacey flushed hotly. But he caught a fleeting gleam of triumph in Marian’s eyes, and at this his anger and most of his shame left him, and he only felt drearily that it was no use, she hated him and had got him there on purpose to take this sort of small revenge. It was true that she had led him on and stabbed just when he had generously disarmed; she had not played fair. But, after all, why should she?
She baffled him to-day, though. He thought that now he was in for it, that she would try to lead him into some further trap. Instead, she grew suddenly listless, talked indifferently of casual things, or, again, talked rapidly and artificially. She made no more onslaughts, was rather kind to him than otherwise, ringing for the butler to bring up a brand of cigarettes of which she knew Stacey was fond. But he felt her to be immensely sophisticated, with no girlishness remaining. Leaning back in her chair she had the weary perfection of something finished, complete and soulless. There was no trace left in her of the elfish charm for which he had once loved her idolatrously. Nor had there been at the very beginning of the afternoon when she had seemed fresh and spontaneous.
She went down to the door with him when he left her, but she shook hands almost apathetically.
He puzzled over it as he walked homeward. He could not understand what Marian had been about. Surely she had not summoned him to give him that one thrust. She was too clever not to have been able to do more than that if revenge was what she had been after. It did not occur to him that Marian might simply have been intolerably bored and have wanted him as some kind of relief, to cajole or stab as the mood struck her. What Stacey did feel was that it was restful to go back to Catherine and his father from so much futile complexity. Not that they were so limpid, either, come to think about it; Catherine especially wasn’t. But they were direct.
The interview left him feeling a little sore,—not altogether, though partly, because he had been wounded in his self-esteem. But this did not last; the matter was too trivial to annoy him for long. He forgot all about it in his work.
It was just two weeks later at about four in the afternoon when the door of Stacey’s office was thrown open and Ames Price strode in. Stacey’s first feeling was one of surprise and repressed amusement; for he had not seen Ames since the evening of the outrageous jest played on him at the road-house. Stacey’s second emotion, following immediately, was a sick comprehending horror. It was as though he had known everything beforehand in a dream that he had forgotten and that had fought in vain to break loose and summon him.
Ames’s heavy face was set, in a struggle for self-control, and his voice when he spoke was thick and difficult.
“Come with me, Carroll,” he stammered.
Stacey had already sprung to his feet. He was paler than Ames. “Yes,” he said, and snatched up his hat.
The other clenched his fists. “You mean to say—you know already, damn you? Some one’s told you?”