"Only God left who wouldn't call it adultery?"
The word in her mouth shocked him.
CHAPTER XXXVI
She sat quite still after that while he talked. After that one deplorable bald word she said no more at all; and Ingram's passionate explanations and asseverations only every now and then caught her ear. She was going home. That was all she knew and could think of. Back to Robert. Away from Ingram. Somehow. At once. Robert would turn her out—Ingram was saying so, she heard that. Robert might kill her—Ingram was saying so, she heard that, too; he didn't say kill, he called it ill-using, but whatever it was who cared? She would at least, she thought with a new grimness, be killed legitimately. She was going back to Robert, going to tell him she was sorry. Anyhow that. Then he could do what he chose. But how to get to him? Oh, how to get to him? Her thoughts whirled. Ingram wouldn't let her go, but she was going. Ingram had her money, but she was going. That very night. Her thoughts, whirling and whizzing, went breathless here in dark, terrifying places. And while she was flying along on them like a leaf on a hurricane blast, Ingram was still kissing her hand, still pouring out phrases as he had been doing ever since—surely ever since Time began? She stared at him, remembering him in a kind of wonder. She caught a word here and there: pellucid, he was saying something was, translucent. She felt no resentment. She had deserved all she had got. Not Ingram and what he had told her or not told her mattered, but Robert. How to reach Robert, how to get near enough to him to say, "See—I've come back. Draggled and muddied. Everybody believes it. You'll believe it, though I tell you it's not true. And if you believe it or not it's your ruin. You'll have to leave this place, and all your work and hopes. Now kill me."
"A man," she heard Ingram going on, still passionately explaining what was so completely plain, "must pretend things at the beginning to get his dear woman—"
"Of course, of course," nodded her thoughts in hurried agreement, rushing past him to the swift turning over of ways of reaching Robert—who cared about dear women?—how to hide from Ingram that she was going, how to keep him from suspecting her, from watching her every instant....
A vision of herself in the restaurant car handing him over the money she had, chaining herself of her own accord to him, rose for a moment—danced mockingly, it was so ludicrously important an action and at the same time so small and natural—before her eyes. The chances of life! The way small simplicities worked out great devastations. She threw back her head in a brief, astonished laugh.
Instantly Ingram kissed her throat.
"I—I—" she gasped, getting up quickly.