This treachery was a shock to Sylvia, and she was horrified at herself for feeling it so deeply. Ever since that day in Oxford when Lily had sobbed out her griefs, Sylvia had concentrated upon her all the capacity for affection which had begun to blossom during the time she was with Philip and which had been cut off ruthlessly with everything else that belonged to life with him. She knew that she should have foreseen the possibility, nay the probability, of this happening, but she had charmed herself with the romantic setting of their musical adventure and let all else go.
“I’m awfully sorry, Sylvia,” said Jack; “I ought to have kept a better lookout on Claude.”
“It’s not your fault, old son. But, O God! why can’t four people stay friends without muddling everything up with this accursed love?”
Jack was sympathetic, but it was useless to confide in him her feeling for Lily; he would never understand. She would seem to him so little worth while; for him the behavior of such a one meant less than the breaking of a porcelain figure.
“It did seem worth while,” Sylvia said to herself, that night, “to keep that frail and lovely thing from this. It was my fault, of course, for I knew both Lily and Claude through and through. Yet what does it matter? What a fool I am. It was absurd of me to imagine we could go on forever as we were. I don’t really mind about Lily; I’m angry because my conceit has been wounded. It serves me right. But that dirty little actor won’t appreciate her. He’s probably sick of her easiness already. Oh, why the hell am I not a man?”
Presently, however, Sylvia’s mood of indignation burned itself out; she began to attribute the elopement of Claude and Lily to the characters they had assumed of Harlequin and Columbine, and to regard the whole affair as a scene from a play which must not be taken more deeply to heart than with the pensive melancholy that succeeds the fall of the curtain on mimic emotions. After all, what had Lily been to her more than a puppet whose actions she had always controlled for her pleasure until she was stolen from her? Without Lily she was once more at a loose end; there was the whole history of her sorrow.
“I can’t think what they wanted to run away for,” said Jack. Sylvia fancied the flight was the compliment both Harlequin and Columbine had paid to her authority.
“I don’t find you so alarming,” he said.
“No, old son, because you and I have always regarded the Quartet from a strictly professional point of view, and consequently each other. Meanwhile the poor old Quartet is done in. We two can’t sustain a program alone.”
Airdale gloomily assented, but thought it would be well to continue for a week or so, in case Claude and Lily came back.