Emily tried to extract comfort out of these confirmations of her opinion of the couple she was blaming for Marlowe’s forcing the inevitable issue at a most inopportune time. But her spirits refused to rise. “It’s of no use to deny it,” she said to herself, with a sick and sinking heart. “I shall miss him dreadfully. What can take his place?”
She wished to be alone; the dinner seemed an interminable prospect, was an hour and a half of counted and lingering minutes. When the coffee was served she announced a severe headache, insisted on going at once and alone, would permit escort only to a cab. As she went she seemed to be passing, deserted and forlorn, through a world of comrades and lovers—men two and two, women two and two, men and women together in pairs or in parties. Out in the Champs Elysees, stars and soft, warm air, and love-inviting shadows among the trees; here and there the sudden dazzling blaze of the lights of a café chantant, and music; a multitude of cabs rolling by, laughter or a suggestion of romance floating in the wake of each. “Hide yourself!” the city and the night were saying to her, “Hide your heartache! Nobody cares, nobody wishes to see!”
And she hastened to hide herself, to lie stunned in the beat of a black and bitter sea.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“THE REAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE.”
MARLOWE had been held above his normal self, not by Emily, but by an exalting love for her. Except in occasional momentary moods of exuberant animalism, he had not been low and coarse. Whatever else might be said of the love affairs whose tombstones strewed his past, it could not be said that they were degrading to the parties at interest. But there was in his mind a wide remove between all the others and Emily. His love for her was as far above him as her love for him after she ceased to respect him had been beneath her. And her courage and independence came to her rescue none too soon. He could not much longer have persisted in a state so unnatural to his character and habit. Indeed it was unconsciously the desire to get her where he could gradually lead her down to his fixed and unchangeable level, that forced him on to join that disastrous issue.
As he journeyed toward London the next night, he was industriously preparing to eject love for her by a vigorous campaign of consolation. Vanity had never ceased to rule him. It had tolerated love so long as love seemed to be coöperating with it. It now resumed unchecked sway.
Before he went to Paris he was much stirred by Victoria’s beauty. He thought that fear of her becoming a menace to his loyalty had caused him to appeal to Emily. And naturally he now turned toward Victoria, and made ready for a deliberately reckless infatuation. He plunged the very afternoon of his return to London, and he was soon succeeding beyond the bounds which his judgment had set in the planning. This triumph over a humiliating defeat was won by many and powerful allies—resentment against Emily for her wounds to his vanity, craving for consolation, a vigorous and passionate imagination, the desire to show his superiority over the fascinating Kilboggan, and, strongest of all, Victoria’s fame and extraordinary physical charms. If Emily could have looked into his mind two weeks after he left her, she would have been much chagrined, and would no doubt have fallen into the error of fancying that his love had not been genuine and, for him, deep.
He erected Victoria into an idol, put his good sense out of commission, fell down and worshipped. He found her a reincarnation of some wonderful Greek woman who had inspired the sculptors of Pericles. He wrote her burning letters. When he was with her he gave her no opportunity to show him whether she was wise or silly, deep or shallow, intelligent or stupid. When she did speak he heard, not her words, but only the vibrations of that voice which had made her the success of the season—the voice that entranced all and soon seemed to him to strike the chord to which every fibre of his every nerve responded. He dreamed of those gold braids, unwound and showering about those strange, lean, maddening shoulders and arms of hers.
In that mood, experience, insight into the ways and motives of women went for no more than in any other mood of any other mode of love. He knew that he was in a delirium, incapable of reason or judgment. But he had no desire to abate, perhaps destroy, his pleasure by sobering and steadying himself.
He convinced himself that Kilboggan was an unsatisfied admirer of Victoria. When Kilboggan left her to marry the rich wife his mother had at last found for him, he believed that the “nobleman” had been driven away by Victoria because she feared her beloved Marlowe disapproved of him. And when he found that Victoria would never be his until they should marry, he began to cast about to free himself. After drafting and discarding many letters, and just when he was in despair—“It’s impossible even to begin right”—he had what seemed to him an inspiration. “The telegraph! One does not have to begin or end a telegram; and it can be abrupt without jar, and terse without baldness.” He sent away his very first effort: