Facing it still, Cassy sat in the brocaded chair. Anger had shaken her and gone, taking with it its spawn which hatred is. What inhabited her then was disgust.
I am in a nice mess, she told herself. But she told it without surprise, as though all along it was something which she might have known, could have avoided, but into which she had put her foot. A momentary vision of the red-crossed Lady Bountiful returned and she even smiled at it. It was a sad little smile though.
Abstractedly, she had been turning and twisting the rings. The motion aroused her. It drew her attention to them. They also had something to say. Something which they had been saying ever since the smoke curled from the pipe. She had not heard it then. There had been too many things tumbling about her. But now she did hear. She took them off, stood up and dropped them on the table where they fell between gold-backed brushes and a vase, gorgeous in delicacy, the colour of ox-blood.
From a cupboard she took the rowdy frock, the tam, the basilica underwear and, for a moment, searched and searched vainly for a pair of stockings. In hunting for them she unearthed the bundle, and that together with the other things, she threw on the bed, which was not brocaded, or even daised. It was silver. A few days before, when she had first seen it, she had clapped her hands. The vase too she had applauded. Now the lovely room, that had seemed so lovely, a curl of smoke had turned into a lupanar.
Quickly, one after another, the modish hat, the delicious frock, the things that could be drawn through a ring, were removed and replaced. In the mirror she looked, stopped, looked again, adjusted the tam and was going to the bed for the bundle when she heard a horn. Head-drawn, she listened.
She would have so much preferred to leave without seeing him or speaking to him. If she could, she would have gone without a word, silently, in the only dignified manner that was possible. But, apparently, matters had arranged themselves otherwise. She went to the bed, took the bundle, moved back to the table and waited.
She did not wait long. Paliser, with the pretence of a knock and a smile on his lips walked in—but not far. That frock, that bundle, the sight of her there, sufficed. He knew. With an awkwardness that was unusual with him, he closed the door and twisted his hat. The smile had gone from his lips. They were dry.
Then as he looked at her and she looked at him—and with what a look!—words seemed such poor things. It was as though already everything had been said, as perhaps in the silent temples of their being, everything, accusations, recriminations, all the futilities of speech had been uttered, impotently, a moment since. A moment earlier she had said her say. As he looked at her he knew that she had and knew too, that before he entered the room, already she had heard his replies.
The consciousness of this, equally shared by both, was so intense that, for a second, Cassy felt that everything happening then had happened ages ago, that she was taking part in a drama rehearsed on a stage that memory cannot reconstruct but which stood, and, it may be, still stands, back of those doors that close behind our birth.
The hallucination, if it be one, and which, given certain crises of the emotions, is common enough, vanished abruptly as it had come. But two seconds had gone since Paliser entered the room, yet, in those seconds, both recognised that eternity had begun between them.