“Yes—the Americans are good to me—so generous and friendly,” replied Victoria. “Of course the play is poor. I couldn’t have done anything with it if George hadn’t made it over so cleverly.”
Stilson smiled. Banning, the dramatic critic, had told him that her part was beyond Miss Fenton, and that only her stage-presence and magnetic voice saved her from failure. “You players must have a mournful time of it with these stupid playwrights,” he said with safe sarcasm.
“You can’t imagine!” Victoria flung out her long, narrow white hand in a stage-gesture of despair. “And they are so ungrateful after we have created their characters for them and have given them reputation and fortune.”
Stilson noted that Marlowe was listening with a faint sneer. His manner towards his wife was a surface-politeness that too carelessly concealed his estimate of her mental limitations. Stilson’s manner toward “Miss Feronia”—he called her that more often than he called her Marguerite—was almost distant courtesy, the manner of one who tenaciously maintains an impenetrable wall between himself and another whose relations to him would naturally be of the closest intimacy. And while Victoria was self-absorbed, obviously never questioning that her husband was her admirer and devoted lover, Marguerite was nervously attentive to Stilson’s words and looks, at once delighted and made ill-at-ease by his presence.
Her eyes were by turns brilliant and stupidly dull. Either a stream of words was issuing from between her shut teeth or her lids were drooped and she seemed to be falling asleep. Marlowe recognised the morphine-eater and thought he understood why Stilson was gloomy and white. Victoria ate, Marguerite talked, and the two men listlessly smoked. At the first opportunity they moved together and Marlowe began asking about the Democrat and his acquaintances there.
“And what has become of Miss Bromfield?” he asked, after many other questions.
“She’s gone to a magazine,” replied Stilson, his voice straining to be colourless. But Marlowe did not note the tone and instantly his wife interrupted:
“Yes, what has become of Miss Bromfield—didn’t I hear George asking after her? You know, Mr. Stilson, I took George away from her. Poor thing, it must have broken her heart to lose him.” And she vented her empty affected stage-laugh.
Colour flared in the faces of both the men, and Stilson went to the open fire and began stirring it savagely.
“Pray don’t think I encouraged my wife to that idea,” Marlowe said, apparently to Marguerite. “It’s one of her fixed delusions.”