There is in every one of us a chamber where vanity and hope live and ever conspire to deceive, and if possible, destroy us. From that secret chamber she now wrenched an amazing secret. She discovered that from the beginning—yes, from the beginning—she, determined to satisfy the craving of elemental flesh and blood, had been lying to herself about Basil Gallatin. Passion had taken sly advantage of her loneliness and her longing for sympathy and companionship; it had beguiled her imagination into creating out of the very ordinary materials of his true personality the lover she had been adoring. One by one she took out and reëxamined all her memory plates of him. Now, a memory plate is like any other photographic plate; it has a surface picture and it also yields to a close scrutiny a thousand details which do not appear upon the surface. Long before she finished, she was realizing that she had all along, with the deliberate craft of self-deception, been hiding from herself the trick her feelings were practicing upon her intelligence. Basil—pleasing manners and dress, amiable disposition, animalism agreeably disguised by education—Basil had been plausible enough to pass muster with her, ready and eager to be deluded because of her craving for love. True, he had posed to a certain extent. But he was not really responsible for the fraud. The blame was hers—all hers.
But disillusion no more destroys a love longing than lack of food and drink destroys hunger and thirst. High above moans of shame over the pitiful collapse of her romance rose the defiant clamors of hunger and thirst. They had been lovers, he and she; and that fact in itself was a bond which a woman, at least a woman of her temperament of fidelity, could not easily break. She feared when he, sober and a gentleman once more, sweet and winning, came to her and pleaded for forgiveness she would forgive—would in her loneliness and heart hunger take what she could get rather than have nothing and the ache of nothingness. It is—at least, it has been, up to and into the present time—second nature to woman to depend upon a man, to select some one man, the best available, and stake everything upon him. Basil Gallatin was that man for her. And—not in novels, but in life—before any woman, however high minded, goes away to utter aloneness from a man who cares for her, he must have disclosed some traits more abhorrent than any such human traits as those of Basil. Yes—human. Was it his fault that he had not given her the kind of love she wanted? Was it not probably her fault that he had not been inspired to that kind of love? Perhaps, too, the love of any man, could it be seen in the nakedness of drunkenness, would be much like Basil's. "I'm only a woman," she said. "I mustn't forget that. I've no right to expect much." And then she shuddered; for in her very ears was the sound of those cold rains falling day and night upon her loneliness and despair.
She saw herself accepting; for, a great deal less than half a loaf is better than no bread. And if she accepted, she must adapt herself—must force herself to acquire a liking for what she must eat or go altogether hungry. She saw herself wending down and down—to the level at which he had from the beginning thought her arrived. She looked all around. Nothing—no one—to save her. For, what could she hope from Richard?—from any man? Was not Basil giving about the best man had to offer woman in the way of association? There was the Richard sort of man—an abstraction—an impossibility. There was the Shirley Drummond sort of man—a human incarnation of Old Dog Tray—equally impossible. There was the third sort of man—the Basil sort, somewhere between the two impossibilities. Life must be lived, and with human beings. Of the three available kinds of associates, was not the Basil sort the most livable? Rather Basil than being frozen to death by a Richard or bored to death by a Shirley. The conclusion seemed cynical; but there was no cynicism in the sad woman who faced that conclusion.
She did not go down to breakfast; and Basil, she learned, kept away also. When he did not appear at dinner she knew he had determined to wait until he should surely see her alone. The emotion that stirred in her because his place at the table was vacant gave her more and sadder light upon how little the heart heeds the things that impress the mind and the self-respect. About the middle of the afternoon she was at the small antique desk in the corner of her sitting room, trying to write a letter. But the charm of the day, the beauty of full-foliaged trees, of lake and cloudless sky seen through the creeper-framed window, would not let her write. As she gazed, her unhappiness calmed and all her senses flooded with the joy that laughs in sunbeams, in light and shadow floating on the grass, in flight and song of birds, in grace and color and perfume of flowers, the joy that mocks at moral struggle and flutters alluringly the gay banner of the gospel of eat, drink and be merry.
As she took her pen to go on with the letter, Lizzie appeared in the hall doorway. "Mr. Vaughan asked me to tell you," she said, "that he'd gone out and might not be back for supper."
"Very well," said Courtney, not turning round. It flitted across her mind that this was an extraordinary message for Richard to send—Richard who came and went as he pleased and sent no word when he was not coming to dinner or supper. "Where's he gone?" she asked—an extraordinary question from her to match the extraordinary message from him.
"He was in a hurry and didn't say," replied Lizzie. "I'll find out."
"Oh, no. It doesn't matter."
Lizzie went, and in her dreaming and thinking Courtney soon forgot the incident. Again Lizzie's voice interrupted—"Mr. Vaughan's gone to see old Nanny."
"Nanny!" said Courtney. She never thought of the old woman except as the memorandum of her pension check appeared every three months in the household accounts.