"That's the only way people brought up as we've been ever do anything. If we don't act on impulse, we don't act at all; we drift on."
"Drifting is action, the most decisive kind of action." Madelene was again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself. Just then she was called to the telephone. When she came back she found Adelaide restored to her usual appearance—the fashionable, light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from without. But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene's common-sense analysis of her romance by saying: "A while ago you said there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn't name the third. What is it?"
"Dishonor," said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her.
Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law's level gaze. "Yes," was all she said.
A silence; then Madelene: "Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem at all, so far as Dory or Ross's wife is concerned; or the whole outside world, for that matter. It's purely personal; it's altogether the problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself. The others'll get over it; but can you?"
Del made no reply. A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again. Reviewing her amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not sorry. Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to another her naked soul, and that other a woman—true, an unusual woman, by profession a confessor, but still a woman. Thenceforth some one other than herself would know her as she really was—not at all the nice, delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels, who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room. "I don't care!" concluded Adelaide. "If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of human nature."
CHAPTER XXV
MAN AND GENTLEMAN
A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of mind, coming home from supper at her mother's, found Estelle Wilmot on the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague. She had seen this same sight perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with her at the Villa d'Orsay. On this particular evening his manner toward Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone. She wondered that she had been blind to what was now obvious.
"Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work," said she smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind gray eyes. Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle, "Perhaps he hasn't told you that he was made superintendent of the cooperage to-day?"