“I don’t understand you. I thought you were going to marry him——”
“No! No! Never!... Only stand by me till I get over it. It won’t last. He’ll go away soon. It’s madness; I know it. But you don’t know how I suffer. I can’t help myself. Oh, Frances, you’re so cool and reasonable, you don’t know!”
The flood of her confession was not to be dammed. Frances had to hear it all and to learn its lesson, as well as her unready mind permitted. And all the time she listened, in shame, pity and disgust, her adventuring spirit was eagerly and thirstily drinking this new knowledge, this experience, precious even if vicarious.
She really understood very little of it. Miss Eppendorfer, although protesting constantly how she “loved” Kurt, seemed actually to display more hate than affection. She bore him a bitter grudge for this “love.” She was full of stories of his sneers, his taunts; how he had pulled the pins out of her hair and then laughed himself sick at the bleached and scanty locks. How he compared her to other women whom he had seen in the course of the day; how he had asked her to sing, and then mocked her. How he wasted her money and forever demanded more. She knew that he ridiculed her to his friends. He encouraged her to drink and then got her to sign cheques....
The end of her recital left her stripped of all decency, all honour, showed her a weak fool destroyed by a vice, something to shudder at: yet her honesty, her lack of self-justification, the eternal and naked humanness in it all, touched even the fastidious young girl.
“This awful thing is I!” the woman seemed to say. “This is my soul. May God help me, and Man pity me!”
Frances sat beside her till she fell asleep, wiser, kinder, better than she had ever been before.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
Mr. Naylor telephoned the next morning.