He looked at her with coarse contempt, rose and stalked away. Marian sat rigid. She was conscious of the insult. But even that humiliation was not so strong in her mind as the astounding revelation of Danvers. She remembered that even as his eyes blazed hatred at her, he looked at her, at her neck, her bare arms, with the baffled desire of brute passion. She did not fully understand the look, but she felt that it was a degradation far greater than his insulting words.
She slipped, almost skulked to her room, her eyes down, her face in a burning flush, her scarf drawn tightly about her neck. As her door closed behind her, she fell upon her bed and began to sob hysterically. She started up with a scream to find her cousin standing beside her.
“I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” Mrs. Carnarvon’s voice had lost its wonted levity. “I saw that you were in trouble and followed. I knocked and I thought I heard you answer. What is it, Marie? May I ask? Can I do anything?”
Marian drew her down to the bed and buried her face in her lap. “Oh, I feel so unclean,” she said. “It was—Teddy. Would you believe it, Jessie, Teddy! I looked on him as a brother. And he showed me that he was not my friend—that he didn’t even love me—that he—oh, I shall never forget the look in his eyes. He made me feel like a—like a thing.”
Mrs. Carnarvon smothered a smile. “Of course Teddy’s a brute,” she said. “I thought you knew. He’s a domesticated brute, like most of the men and some of the women. You’ll have to get used to that.”
By refusing to fall in with her mood, Mrs. Carnarvon had gone far toward curing it. Marian stopped sobbing and presently said:
“Oh, I know all that. But I didn’t expect it from Teddy—and toward me. And—” she shuddered—“I was thinking, actually thinking of marrying him. I wish never to see him again. And he pretended to be my friend!”
“And he was, no doubt, until he got you on the brain in another way, in the way he calls love. There isn’t any love that has friendship in it.”
“We must go away at once.”
“Unless Teddy saves us the trouble by going first, as I suspect he will.”