Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed "sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble tank—and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to take up and utilize—one could see how practically!—the overflow from the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted herself in a hundred ways—if ever woman was entitled to a little compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!
The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors, engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued, persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What! She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of an invisible judge—of the husband who had been first to shake himself free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to say this—she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied, resisted—then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.
Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person. He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous significance.
He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had passed between herself and Justine—but the latter was conscious that their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them. Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded, she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could not be long before a summons came....
Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr. Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them an instinctive and irreducible hostility—they would have disliked each other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.
Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined—ruined—that was what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find herself cramped, restricted—to be warned that she must "manage," hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was no money to build the gymnasium—none at all! And all because it had been swallowed up at Westmore—because the ridiculous changes there, the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of—that Truscomb and all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first—these changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her income, that it might be years—yes, he said years!—before she would feel herself free again—free of her own fortune, of Cicely's fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child to enjoy!
Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments. Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the facts came on her as a surprise—that she had quite forgotten the temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine, though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....
Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and restrain—to reason would have been idle. She had never till now realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
"The humiliation—before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen—and now! From the first it was all he cared for—in Europe, even, he was always dragging me to factories. Me?—I was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted power—power, that's all—when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us—nothing, nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"