"Jan was asking me again about—you, Beryl. I can't get him to talk about anything else. I think you will have to decide one way or the other." He was pulling on his gloves, an operation which gave him an excuse for looking elsewhere than at her. "It struck me that he was growing impatient. You are to please yourself—but the suspense is rather getting on my nerves."
She made no answer until, accompanying him to the door, she made a sudden resolve.
"How long will you be at Ronnie's?" she asked.
"An hour, no longer, I think, why?"
"I wondered," she said.
It was lamentably, wickedly weak in her; a servile surrender to expediency. She knew it, but in her desperation she seized the one straw that floated upon the inexorable current which was carrying her to physical and moral damnation. Ronnie must save her: Ronnie, to whom she had best right of appeal. It was a bitter, hateful confession, that, despising him, she loved him. She loved the two halves of the perfect man. Sault and Ronnie Morelle were the very soul and body of love. She loathed herself—yet she knew it was the truth. Ronnie must help. He might not be so vile as she believed him to be: there might be a spirit in him, a something to which she could reach. The instinct of honor, some spark of courage and justice transmitted to him by the men and women who bred him. Anything was better than Steppe, she told herself wildly, anything! She dreamed of him, terrible dreams that revolted her to wakefulness: by day she kept him from her mind. And then came night and the unclean dreams that made her very soul writhe in an agony of shame, lest, in dreaming, she had exposed a foulness which consciously she had seen in herself.
If Ronnie failed—
("Ronnie will fail: you know he will fail," whispered the voice of reason.)
She could but try.