She wore a soft lavender frock, and was utterly delectable, and when I reflected that but for this impassable barrier, which my own action in the past had been the means of erecting between us, I might now have made her love me, and that on this, our wedding day, she might have been coming into my arms. I could have groaned aloud.
"May I open the window," she said with the air of an offended Empress.
"Yes, do, open it wide," and then I laughed aloud cynically. I could as easily have cried.
Alathea would not of course have spoken about her suspicions, to do so would have inferred that she took an interest in me beyond that of a secretary; every impression she always has given me is that nothing in my life can matter to her one jot. But I know that this affair of Suzette does matter to her, that she resents it bitterly, that it is the cause of her smouldering anger with me. She resents it because she is a woman, and, how I wish I might believe that it is because she is not as indifferent towards me as she pretends.
She poured out the tea. I expect my face looked like the devil, I did not speak, I knew I was frowning angrily. A rising wind blew the curtain out and banged the window. She got up and shut it, then she threw some cedar dust on the fire from the box which it is kept in on a table near. She had seen Burton do this no doubt. I love the smell of cedar burning.
Then she came back and poured out the tea and we both drank it silently.
The room looked so comfortable and home like, with its panelling of old pitch pine, cleaned of its paint and mellowed and waxed, so that it seems like deep amber, showing up the greyish pear-wood carvings. One might have been in some room in old England of about 1699. Everything looked the setting for a love scene. The glowing lamps, apricot shaded, and the firelight, and the yellow roses everywhere, and two human beings who belonged to one another and were young, and not cold of nature, sitting there with faces of stone, and in each one's heart bitterness. Again I laughed aloud.
The mocking sound seemed to disturb my bride. She allowed her tea cup to rattle as she put it down nervously.
"Would you like me to read to you," she asked icily.
And I said "Yes."