“Come on, let’s go to the studio,” said Michael. He felt that Stella’s tears were inappropriate to the dining-room. Indeed, only the fact that she was wearing this evening frock of oyster-gray satin, and was therefore not altogether the invulnerable and familiar and slightly boyish Stella imprinted on his mind, prevented him from being shocked to the point of complete emotional incapacity. It seemed less of an outrage to fondle however clumsily this forlorn creature in gray satin, even though he did find himself automatically and grotesquely saying to himself “Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin and the Confidante stark mad in white muslin.”
“Come along, come along,” he begged her. “You must come to the studio.”
Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but when at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely an ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly than before.
“Look here, I say, why don’t you tell me what you’re crying about? You can’t go on crying forever, you know,” Michael pointed out. “And when you’ve stopped crying, you’ll feel such an ass if you haven’t explained what it was all about.”
“I couldn’t possibly tell anybody,” said Stella, looking very fierce. Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather unusually dramatic.
“But I’m damned if I will give up playing,” she proclaimed; and, sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion her weakness.
It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella’s calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished, she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily Haden.
“I don’t know—really—they’ve left Trelawny Road,” he said, feeling vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.
“And you never think of her, I suppose?” demanded Stella.
“Well, no, I don’t very much.”