The curtains were back and the slats of the shutters were open. Mrs. Ramsay, in her great chair by the table, was using a bottle of salts. She did not look in Frothingham’s direction as he closed the door sharply behind him.
He went to her and scowled down at her. “What the devil did you do that for, Lillian?”
Mrs. Ramsay did not change expression and did not answer.
“No one ever treated you decenter than I did. You——”
“No names, please, Slobsy,” said Mrs. Ramsay, shaking her bottle and sniffing it again.
At “Slobsy” he shivered—he was not a lunatic on the subject of his dignity, but he did not fancy this nickname of his Oxford days, thus inopportunely flung at him. He felt that at one stroke she had cut the ground from under his feet.
“I was sorry to do it,” she continued. “But I couldn’t have you poaching on my preserves, could I now, Slobsy? It cut me to do it”—she looked at him with friendly sympathy—“but you could better afford to lose her than I could. You forgive me, don’t you? You always were sensible.”
“I’ll expose you,” he said—he was once more imperturbable, and was looking at her calmly through his eyeglass and was speaking in his faintly satirical drawl.
“Expose—what?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, sniffing at her salts.
He reflected. Suppose he denounced her, put himself in a position where he could, probably would, be forced to tell all he knew about her, roused her anger and her vindictiveness—whom would he expose? Clearly, no one but himself to Cecilia, or Cecilia to the public. He knew nothing about Mrs. Ramsay that would prove her a fraud—in fifteen years she might have become the properest person in the world, might have developed into a medium. He turned and left the room and the house. Halfway to the corner he paused; a faint, dreary smile drifted over his face.