She drew forth the engagement-book, smiling at her childish game of “pretending.” At eleven, a hat to try on; eleven-thirty, a dress; from then to two o’clock, nothing; at two, a slow solemn drive with poor old Mrs. Minity (in the last-surviving private victoria in the town); tea and bridge at Countess Lanska’s from four to six; a look in at the Rectory of the American church, where there was a Ladies’ Guild meeting about the Devastated Regions’ Fancy Fair; lastly a little dinner at the Casino, with the Horace Betterlys and a few other pals. Yes—a rather-better-than-the-average day. And now—Why, now she could kick over the whole apple-cart if she chose; chuck it all (except the new dress and hat!): the tedious drive with the prosy patronizing old woman; the bridge, which was costing her more than it ought, with that third-rate cosmopolitan set of Laura Lanska’s; the long discussion at the Rectory as to whether it would “do” to ask Mrs. Schlachtberger to take a stall at the Fair in spite of her unfortunate name; and the little dinner with the Horace Betterlys and their dull noisy friends, who wanted to “see life” and didn’t know that you can’t see it unless you’ve first had the brains to imagine it.... Yes, she could drop it all now, and never never see one of them again....
“My daughter ... my daughter Anne.... Oh, you don’t know my little girl? She has changed, hasn’t she? Growing up is a way the children have.... Yes, it is ageing for a poor mother to trot about such a young giantess.... Oh, I’m going gray already, you know—here, on the temples. Fred Landers? It is you, really? Dear old Fred! No, of course I’ve never forgotten you.... Known me anywhere? You would? Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But men don’t change—lucky men! Why, I remember even that Egyptian seal-ring of yours.... My daughter ... my daughter Anne ... let me introduce you to this big girl of mine ... my little Anne....”
It was curious: for the first time she realized that, in thinking back over the years since she had been parted from Anne, she seldom, nowadays, went farther than the episode with Chris. Yet it was long before—it was eighteen years ago—that she had “lost” Anne: “lost” was the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies The Amiable Ones), because a mother couldn’t confess, even to her most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her child. Yet that was what she had done; and now her thoughts, shrinking and shivering, were being forced back upon the fact. She had left Anne when Anne was a baby of three; left her with a dreadful pang, a rending of the inmost fibres, and yet a sense of unutterable relief, because to do so was to escape from the oppression of her married life, the thick atmosphere of self-approval and unperceivingness which emanated from John Clephane like coal-gas from a leaking furnace. So she had put it at the time—so, in her closest soul-scrutiny, she had to put it still. “I couldn’t breathe—” that was all she had to say in her own defence. She had said it first—more’s the pity—to Hylton Davies; with the result that two months later she was on his yacht, headed for the West Indies.... And even then she couldn’t breathe any better; not after the first week or two. The asphyxiation was of a different kind, that was all.
It was a year later that she wrote to her husband. There was no answer: she wrote again. “At any rate, let me see Anne.... I can’t live without Anne.... I’ll go and live with her anywhere you decide....” Again no answer.... She wrote to her mother-in-law, and Mrs. Clephane’s lawyer sent the letter back unopened. She wrote, in her madness, to the child’s nurse, and got a reply from the same legal firm, requesting her to cease to annoy her husband’s family. She ceased.
Of all this she recalled now only the parting from Anne, and the subsequent vain efforts to recover her. Of the agent of her release, of Hylton Davies, she remembered, in the deep sense of remembering, nothing. He had become to her, with his flourish and his yachting-clothes, and the big shining yacht, and the cocoa-palms and general setting of cool drinks and tropical luxury, as unreal as somebody in a novel, the highly coloured hero (or villain) on the “jacket”. From her inmost life he had vanished into a sort of remote pictorial perspective, where a woman of her name figured with him, in muslin dresses and white sunshades, herself as unreal as a lady on a “jacket”.... Dim also had grown the years that followed: lonely humdrum years at St. Jean-de-Luz, at Bordighera, at Dinard. She would settle in a cheap place where there were a circulating library, a mild climate, a few quiet bridge-playing couples whom one got to know through the doctor or the clergyman; then would grow tired and drift away again. Once she went back to America, at the time of her mother’s death.... It was in midsummer, and Anne (now ten years old) was in Canada with her father and grandmother. Kate Clephane, not herself a New Yorker, and with only two or three elderly and disapproving relatives left in the small southern city of her origin, stood alone before the elaborately organized defences of a vast New York clan, and knew herself helpless. But in her madness she dreamed of a dash to Canada, an abduction—schemes requiring money, friends, support, all the power and ruse she was so lacking in. She gave that up in favour of a midnight visit (inspired by Anna Karénine) to the child’s nursery; but on the way to Quebec she heard that the family had left in a private car for the Rocky Mountains. She turned about and took the first steamer to France.
All this, too, had become dim to her since she had known Chris. For the first time, when she met him, her soul’s lungs seemed full of air. Life still dated for her from that day—in spite of the way he had hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away. At thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him she would never have had a self.... And yet, at what a cost she had bought it! All the secluded penitential years that had gone before wiped out at a stroke—stained, defiled by follies she could not bear to think of, among people from whom her soul recoiled. Poor Chris! It was not that he was what is called “vicious”—but he was never happy without what he regarded as excitement; he was always telling her that an artist had to have excitement. She could not reconcile his idea of what this stimulus consisted in with his other tastes and ideas—with that flashing play of intelligence which had caught her up into an air she had never breathed before. To be capable of that thought-play, of those flights, and yet to need gambling, casinos, rowdy crowds, and all the pursuits devised to kill time for the uninventive and lethargic! He said he saw things in that kind of life that she couldn’t see—but since he also saw this unseeable (and she knew he did) in nature, in poetry and painting, in their shared sunsets and moonrises, in their first long dreaming days, far from jazz-bands and baccarat tables, why wasn’t that enough, and how could the other rubbishy things excite the same kind of emotions in him? It had been the torment of her torments, the inmost pang of her misery, that she had never understood; and that when she thought of him now it was through that blur of noise and glare and popping corks and screaming bands that she had to grope back to the first fleeting Chris who had loved her and waked her.
At eleven o’clock she found herself, she didn’t know how, at the milliner’s. Other women, envious or undecided, were already flattening their noses against the panes. “That bird of Paradise ... what they cost nowadays!” But she went in, cool and confident, and asked gaily to try on her new hat. She must have been smiling, for the saleswoman received her with a smile.
“What a complexion, ma’am! One sees you’re not afraid of the wind.”
But when the hat was produced, though it was the copy of one she had already tried on, it struck Mrs. Clephane as absurdly youthful, even ridiculous. Had she really been dressing all this time like a girl in her teens?