“I don’t discourage him—ever—if I can help it. But it was foolish of him to go out today,” she agreed; and all the while she kept on asking herself, as she had that afternoon, in her talk with her husband: “Now, what would be the natural thing for me to say?”
Should she speak of having been at the fire herself—or should she not? The question dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear what her companion was saying; yet she had, at the same time, a queer feeling of his never having been so close to her, or rather so closely intent on her, as now. In her strange state of nervous lucidity, her eyes seemed to absorb with a new precision every facial detail of whoever approached her; and old Sillerton Jackson’s narrow mask, his withered pink cheeks, the veins in the hollow of his temples, under the carefully-tended silvery hair, and the tiny blood-specks in the white of his eyes as he turned their cautious blue gaze on her, appeared as if presented under some powerful lens. With his eyeglasses dangling over one white-gloved hand, the other supporting his opera-hat on his knee, he suggested, behind that assumed carelessness of pose, the patient fixity of a naturalist holding his breath near the crack from which some tiny animal might suddenly issue—if one watched long enough, or gave it, completely enough, the impression of not looking for it, or dreaming it was anywhere near. The sense of that tireless attention made Mrs. Hazeldean’s temples ache as if she sat under a glare of light even brighter than that of the Struthers’ chandeliers—a glare in which each quiver of a half-formed thought might be as visible behind her forehead as the faint lines wrinkling its surface into an uncontrollable frown of anxiety. Yes, Prest was right; she was losing her head—losing it for the first time in the dangerous year during which she had had such continual need to keep it steady.
“What is it? What has happened to me?” she wondered.
There had been alarms before—how could it be otherwise? But they had only stimulated her, made her more alert and prompt; whereas tonight she felt herself quivering away into she knew not what abyss of weakness. What was different, then? Oh, she knew well enough! It was Charles ... that haggard look in his eyes, and the lines of his throat as he had leaned back sleeping. She had never before admitted to herself how ill she thought him; and now, to have to admit it, and at the same time not to have the complete certainty that the look in his eyes was caused by illness only, made the strain unbearable.
She glanced about her with a sudden sense of despair. Of all the people in those brilliant animated groups—of all the women who called her Lizzie, and the men who were familiars at her house—she knew that not one, at that moment, guessed, or could have understood, what she was feeling.... Her eyes fell on Henry Prest, who had come to the surface a little way off, bending over the chair of the handsome Mrs. Lyman. “And you least of all!” she thought. “Yet God knows,” she added with a shiver, “they all have their theories about me!”
“My dear Mrs. Hazeldean, you look a little pale. Are you cold? Shall I get you some champagne?” Sillerton Jackson was officiously suggesting.
“If you think the other women look blooming! My dear man, it’s this hideous vulgar overhead lighting....” She rose impatiently. It had occurred to her that the thing to do—the “natural” thing—would be to stroll up to Jinny Lyman, over whom Prest was still attentively bending. Then people would see if she was nervous, or ill—or afraid!
But half-way she stopped and thought: “Suppose the Parretts and Wessons did see me? Then my joining Jinny while he’s talking to her will look—how will it look?” She began to regret not having had it out on the spot with Sillerton Jackson, who could be trusted to hold his tongue on occasion, especially if a pretty woman threw herself on his mercy. She glanced over her shoulder as if to call him back; but he had turned away, been absorbed into another group, and she found herself, instead, abruptly face to face with Sabina Wesson. Well, perhaps that was better still. After all, it all depended on how much Mrs. Wesson had seen, and what line she meant to take, supposing she had seen anything. She was not likely to be as inscrutable as old Sillerton. Lizzie wished now that she had not forgotten to go to Mrs. Wesson’s last party.
“Dear Mrs. Wesson, it was so kind of you—”
But Mrs. Wesson was not there. By the exercise of that mysterious protective power which enables a woman desirous of not being waylaid to make herself invisible, or to transport herself, by means imperceptible, to another part of the earth’s surface, Mrs. Wesson, who, two seconds earlier, appeared in all her hard handsomeness to be bearing straight down on Mrs. Hazeldean, with a scant yard of clear parquet between them—Mrs. Wesson, as her animated back and her active red fan now called on all the company to notice, had never been there at all, had never seen Mrs. Hazeldean (“Was she at Mrs. Struthers’s last Sunday? How odd! I must have left before she got there—“), but was busily engaged, on the farther side of the piano, in examining a picture to which her attention appeared to have been called by the persons nearest her.