Petulantly she snatched the envelope from the desk and opened it. It was neither bills nor memoranda which fell out, but a letter. Surprised, she unfolded it.
Her eyes swept it, not gathering its meaning. It might have been written in some foreign language, so incomprehensible did it seem. But something deep down in her being trembled as if at approaching dissolution and sent up its wild messages of alarm. Vaguely, afar off, like the shouts of a distant enemy on the hills, the import besieged her spirit.
"I must read it again," she said simply.
She went over it slowly, like one deciphering an ancient hieroglyph.
"My DEAR HONORA:--" (it ran.)
"I am off and away with Mary Morrison. Will this come to you as a complete surprise? I hardly think so. You have been my good comrade and assistant; but Mary Morrison is my woman. I once thought you were, but there was a mistake somewhere. Either I misjudged, or you changed. I hope you'll come across happiness, too, sometime. I never knew the meaning of the word till I met Mary. You and I haven't been able to make each other out. You thought I was bound up heart and soul in the laboratory. I may as well tell you that only a fractional part of my nature was concerned with it. Mary is an unlearned person compared with you, but she knew that, and it is the great fact for both of us.
"It is too bad about the babies. We ought never to have had them. See that they have a good education and count on me to help you. You'll find an account at the bank in your name. There'll be more there for you when that is gone.
"DAVID."
The old German woman was returning, her basket emptied of its load, when Honora came down the steps and crossed the Plaisance.
"My God," said the old woman in her own tongue, "the child did not live!"
Honora walked as somnambulists walk, seeing nothing. But she found her way to the door of the laboratory. The white glare of the chemical lights was over everything--over all the significant, familiar litter of the place. The workmanlike room was alive and palpitating with the personality which had gone out from it--the flaming personality of David Fulham.
The woman who had sold her birthright of charm and seduction for his sake sat down to eat her mess of pottage. Not that she thought even as far as that. Thought appeared to be suspended. As a typhoon has its calm center, so the mad tumult of her spirit held a false peace. She rested there in it, torpid as to emotion, in a curious coma.
Yet she retained her powers of observation. She took her seat before the tanks in which she had demonstrated the correctness of David's amazing scientific assumption. Yet now the creatures that he had burgeoned by his skill, usurping, as it might seem to a timid mind, the very function of the Creator, looked absurd and futile--hateful even. For these things, bearing, as it was possible, after all, no relation to actual life, had she spent her days in desperate service. Then, suddenly, it swept over her, like a blasting wave of ignited gas, that she never had had the pure scientific flame! She had not worked for Truth, but that David might reap great rewards. With her as with the cave woman, the man's favor was the thing! If the cave woman won his approval with base service, she, the aspiring creature of modern times, was no less the slave of her own subservient instincts! And she had failed as the cave woman failed--as all women seemed eventually to fail. The ever-repeated tragedy of woman had merely been enacted once more, with herself for the sorry heroine.