Next morning Sylvia found out that Michael was a “nice boy” whom Lily had known in West Kensington when she was seventeen. He had been awfully in love with her, and her mother had been annoyed because he wanted to marry her. He had only been seventeen himself, and like many other school-boy loves of those days this one had just ended somehow, but exactly how Lily could not recall. She wished that Sylvia would not go on asking so many questions; she really could not remember anything more about it. They had gone once for a long drive in a cab, and there had been a row about that at home.
“Are you in love with him now?” Sylvia demanded.
“No, of course not. How could I be?”
Sylvia was determined that she never should be, either: there should be no more Claude Raglans to interfere with their well-devised existence.
During the next fortnight Sylvia took care that Lily and Michael should never be alone together, and she tried very often, after she discovered that Michael was sensitive, to shock him by references to their life, and with an odd perverseness to try particularly to shock him about herself by making brutally coarse remarks in front of Lily, taking pleasure in his embarrassment. Yet there was in the end little pleasure in shocking him, for he had no conventional niceness; yet there was a pleasure in hurting him, a fierce pleasure.
“Though why on earth I bother about his feelings, I can’t imagine,” Sylvia said to herself. “All I know is that he’s an awful bore and makes us break all sorts of engagements with other people. You liar! You know he’s not a bore, and you know that you don’t care a damn how many engagements you break. Don’t pose to yourself. You’re jealous of him because you think that Lily may get really fond of him. You don’t want her to get fond of him, because you don’t think she’s good enough for him. You don’t want him to get fond of her.”
The boldness of this thought, the way in which it had attacked the secret recesses of her being, startled Sylvia. It was almost a sensation of turning pale at herself, of fearing to understand herself, that made her positively stifle the mood and flee from these thoughts, which might violate her personality.
Down-stairs, there was a telegram from Olive Fanshawe at Brighton, begging Sylvia to come at once; she was terribly unhappy; Sylvia could scarcely tear herself away from Mulberry Cottage at such a moment even for Olive, but, knowing that if she did not go she would be sorry, she went.
Sylvia found Olive in a state of collapse. Dorothy Lonsdale and she had been staying in Brighton for a week’s holiday, and yesterday Dorothy had married Clarehaven. Sylvia laughed.
“Oh, Sylvia, don’t laugh!” Olive begged. “It was perfectly dreadful. Of course it was a great shock to me, but I did not show it. I told her she could count on me as a pal to help her in every way. And what do you think she said? Sylvia, you’ll never guess. It was too cruel. She said to me in a voice of ice, dear—really, a voice of ice—she said the best way I could help her was by not seeing her any more. She did not intend to go near the stage door of a theater again. She did not want to know any of her stage friends any more. She didn’t even say she was sorry; she was quite calm. She was like ice, Sylvia dear. Clarehaven came in and she asked if he’d telegraphed to his mother, and when he said he had she got up as if she’d been calling on me quite formally and shook hands, and said: ‘Good-by, Olive. We’re going down to Clare Court to-morrow, and I don’t expect we shall see each other again for a long time.’ Clarehaven said what rot and that I must come down to Devonshire and stay with them, and Dolly froze him, my dear; she froze him with a look. I never slept all night, and the book I was reading began to repeat itself, and I thought I was going mad; but this morning I found the printers had made some mistake and put sixteen pages twice over. But I really thought I was going mad, so I wired for you. Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, say something to console me! She was like ice, dear, really like a block of ice.”