“The latter part of the week I’m going back to the country. Perhaps you’ll spend Saturday and Sunday there?”
“Thank you,” said I. “Let me know at the Federal Club if your plans change.”
At her door we shook hands, but both lingered. Said she:
“I am glad we are friends again.”
“It was inevitable,” I replied. “We like each other too well not to have come round. Bitternesses and enmities are stupid.”
“And sad,” said she.
When we met again—at her house in the country—there was no constraint on either side. We knew that neither of us had the power to breach, much less to remove, the barrier between us. We ignored its existence—and were content.
You may have observed that I have rarely been able to speak of Edna without resentment. I shall now tell you why:
The friendship between Mary Kirkwood and me presently set the newspaper gossips to talking. Our engagement was announced again and again—the announcement always a pretext for rehashing the story of the matrimonial bankruptcy through which each had passed. But as we were above the reach of the missiles of the scandalmongers the worst that was printed produced only a slight and brief irritation. This until the Princess Frascatoni began her campaign of slander.
I shall not go into it. I shall simply say that she ordered one of her hangers-on—one of the semi-literary parasites to be found in the train of every rich person—to attack Mary and me as keeping up an intrigue of long standing, the one that was the real cause of my wife’s divorcing me. When I read the first of these articles I believed, from certain details, that no one in the world but the Princess Frascatoni could have inspired it. But with my habitual caution I leashed my impetuous anger and did not condemn her until I had investigated. Is it not strange, is it not the irony of fate that in every serious crisis of my life, except one, I should have had coolness and self-control, and that the one exception should have been when I loved Mary Kirkwood and condemned her unheard? After all, I am not sure that love isn’t a kind of lunacy.