But the letter—her letter—stuck. She began arguing with herself about it. She told herself that it was not her style and Ned would know it. Obviously Ned must not suppose that Kellock had written the letter. She noted down a few sentences of the sort of letter she would have written without anybody’s assistance—the letter she had dreamed of writing—and it pleased her much. She found such a flow of words as seemed proper to the tremendous occasion. They glittered and flashed like knives. Invective and self-justification shared the burning pages. She surprised herself at the force and vigour of the phrases. Turning again to Kellock’s composition, she now found it hopelessly inadequate as compared with her own. It was true that she had promised Jordan to post it; but she changed her mind and determined to despatch her own production, as better suited to the parting, far more forcible, far more dramatic and far more the sort of letter she pictured Ned as showing to other people, after the blow had fallen.
She paltered with the situation to the extent of writing another letter embodying a part of Kellock’s. And then she copied this, and copied it again. She destroyed the debris, including Kellock’s original draft, and left one letter perfect in every way—an exceedingly outrageous production.
She sealed it up and next morning assured herself that, for all practical purposes, it was the letter Kellock had designed. From a decision to tell him that she had added a phrase or two, she doubted whether it was worth while. Finally she determined not to tell him that she had altered the letter.
“It’s no good making needless complications,” she thought.
She was very happy and excited. She lived in a dream for a week, and the reality of the things she had decided to do lay altogether outside her calculations and anticipations.
Probably her greatest joy at this juncture centred, not so much in the happiness she had planned for herself and Jordan, as the thought of what people would say at Dene about their flight. She felt that to be invisible among her acquaintances on the morning of her departure, would have been even a greater delight than the first day in London with her future husband.
CHAPTER XI
LYDIA’S DAY
Lydia Trivett always remembered the seventeenth day of March as the most remarkable anniversary in her career. For upon that day she experienced such a succession of extraordinary and unexpected shocks and strains, that, looking back afterwards, she marvelled how any human mind was strong enough to endure them and not break down under such massive and accumulated provocation.