Mrs. Larpent gave another curious little laugh, turned and came back. Franklin glanced quickly at her. She moved closer and there was something about her mouth and nostrils that showed him that he was right in thinking that she had read his thoughts.
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked, taking advantage of the light so that the softness and whiteness of her body should not be lost. One of her smiles had never failed. She adopted it then. Even she retained her optimism.
"What you say goes," said Franklin.
"You mean that, Pelham?" Two or three steps took her within arm's reach. The light remained upon her. If this was merely a marriage of convenience he might make a suggestion that would, at any rate, give her a brief happiness.
"Of course. I only want you to—to tell me what I can do."
Optimism could not live under that suggestion, however generously meant and delicately put, of payment by cheque. Nevertheless, Ida Larpent sat down. It was bitter to see that her love was not to be returned, but good to feel that her diminished bank account was likely to be substantially refreshed. She felt like a woman who had swum out of her depth, lost her nerve, made a mighty effort and feels at last the sand against her knees. Metaphorically she drew herself wearily out of the water and with a renewed sense of confidence felt the warm sun upon her limbs.
There was something detestably cold-blooded in all this, and Franklin hated it. He had hitherto managed to keep himself free from women. They interfered with his pursuits. Why fate should have gone suddenly out of its way to plunge him into the midst of this woman stuff, as he impatiently called it, was more than he could understand.
He looked down at Ida Larpent. She was sitting in a low, red-leather chair,—the sort of thing that is supposed to belong to a room inhabited by men. Her amazing hair, as black as the wing of a crow, had been touched here and there with the tongs. It framed a face as white as marble,—a curiously small oval face,—with eyes remarkably wide apart and large and luminous; a small aristocratic nose, with sensitive nostrils which indicated passion as well as impatience, and a mouth whose lips were full and artificially red. Her small round white shoulders were more daringly bare than those of any woman he had seen, and her two fine hands looked like those in the old French pictures which hang in those houses in Paris that were spared by the Sans-Culottes. Indeed, the whole figure, from head to foot, looked like an oil painting of a period in French history when aristocracy had reached its acme. As a companion for a man of enforced leisure and unlimited means and no ties she had everything in her favor, physically and mentally. As Franklin stood looking at her, however, with all the admiration that was due to her, he found himself unconsciously comparing her,—this exotic—this most exquisite of rare orchids,—with the fresh, buoyant, healthy, clean, proud, spoilt girl who called herself his wife.
"Will you be honest with me?" she asked.
"I haven't got much to bless myself with except that," he answered.