“If you feel like that about him, I should have thought the best way to punish him would be to let the marriage proceed; to punish him further you’ve only to refuse yourself to him when he’s married, for I’m quite sure that within six months he’ll be writing to say what a mistake he made, how cold his wife is, and how much he longs to come back to you, la jolie maîtresse de sa jeunesse, le souvenir du bon temps jadis, and so on with the sentimental eternities of reconstructed passion.”
“Live with him after he’s married?” Lily exclaimed. “Why, I’ve never even kissed a married man! I should never forgive myself.”
“You don’t love him at all, do you?” Sylvia asked, pressing her hands down on Lily’s shoulders and forcing her to look straight at her. “Laugh, my dear, laugh! Hurrah! you can’t pretend you care a bit about him. Fifty thousand francs and freedom! And just when I was getting bored with Paris.”
“It’s all very well for you, Sylvia,” Lily said, resentfully, as she tried to shake off Sylvia’s exuberance. “You don’t want to be married. I do. I really looked forward to marrying Michael.”
Sylvia’s face hardened.
“Oh, I know you blame me entirely for that,” she continued. “But it wasn’t my fault, really. It was bad luck. It’s no good pretending I wasn’t fond of Claude. I was, and when I met him—”
“Look here, don’t let’s live that episode over again in discussion,” Sylvia said. “It belongs to the past, and I’ve always had a great objection to body-snatching.”
“What I was going to explain,” Lily went on, “was that Michael put the idea of marriage into my head. Then being always with Hector, I got used to being with somebody. I was always treated like a married woman when we went to the seaside or on motoring tours. You always think that because I sit still and say nothing my mind’s an absolute blank, but it isn’t. I’ve been thinking for a long time about marriage. After all, there must be something in marriage, or so many people wouldn’t get married. You married the wrong man, but I don’t believe you’ll ever find the right man. You’re much, much, much too critical. I will get married.”
“And now,” Sylvia said, with a laugh, “to all the other riddles that torment my poor brain I must add you.”
Hector Ozanne tried to stanch Lily’s wounded ideals with a generous compress of notes; he succeeded.