"That is too bad. I thought you would anticipate some of the charming little dinners I intend to give. He has dreadful attacks of the gout, I have learned, and sometimes I'll ask you to preside with me in his vacant chair. That is, if you"—
But he would hear no more. He turned on his heel and left her. He bitterly told himself that her heart was ice, and not worth wasting a thought upon. But he wasted a good many that night, and days afterward.
Whether ice or not, it was a very heavy heart as Pauline went homeward. Just in proportion as the excuses for her conduct were ready on her lips, so they were futile to appease her conscience.
And yet she exulted in one justifying circumstance, as she herself named it. "If I loved anybody—Court, or anybody else," she reflected, "I never could do it! But I don't. It's going to make a great personage of me. I want to find out how it feels to be a great personage. I want to try the new sensation of not wearing charity gloves...." She had almost a paroxysm of nervous tears, alone in her own room, a little later. That evening Mr. Varick once more presented himself....
At about eleven o'clock he jumped into a cab which he had kept waiting an interminable time, and lighted a very fragrant cigar as he was being driven off.
"Elle est belle à faire peur," he muttered aloud. And the next moment a thought passed through his mind which would resemble this, if put into English, though he always thought in French:—
"I will write to Madeleine to-morrow, and send her ten thousand francs. That will end everything—and if the gout spares me five years longer I shan't see Paris while it does."
He had not by any means come home to die. He had said so because it had a neat sound, throwing a perfume of sentiment about his return. And he was always fond of the perfume of sentiment. In reality he had come home to look after his affairs, which had grown burdensomely prosperous, and then sail back with all the decorous haste allowable.
Perhaps he had come home with a few other trifling motives. But of every conceivable motive, he had not come with one. That one was—to marry. And yet he had to-night arranged his alliance (satisfactorily on both sides, it was to be hoped) with Miss Pauline Van Corlear.
He leaned back in the dimness of the speeding cab, and reflected upon it. His reflections made him laugh, and as he laughed his lip curled up below his white mustache and showed his white teeth, with the good, dark cigar between them—the teeth of which Pauline had said that if they were false she did not wish to know it.