A smile quivered and died on Margaret’s lips. “I might retort that you know nothing about love.”
With an impatient birdlike gesture Dorothy tossed her burned-out cigarette into the fire. “Whose love?” she inquired as she opened the Florentine box, “Herbert’s or yours?”
“It’s all the same, isn’t it?”
By the flame of the match she had struck Dorothy’s expression appeared almost malign. “There, my dear, is where you are wrong,” she replied. “When a man and a woman talk of love they speak two different languages. They can never understand each other because women love with their imagination and men with their senses. To you love is a thing in itself, a kind of abstract power like religion; to Herbert it is simply the way he feels.”
“But if he loves the other woman, he doesn’t love Janet; and yet he wants to return to her.” Leaning back in her chair, Dorothy surveyed her with a look which was at once sympathetic and mocking. Her gaze swept the pure grave features; the shining dusk of the hair; the narrow nose with its slight arch in the middle; the straight red lips with their resolute pressure; the skin so like a fading rose-leaf. Yes, there was beauty in Margaret’s face if one were only artist or saint enough to perceive it.
“There is so much more in marriage than either love or indifference,” she remarked casually. “There is, for instance, comfort.”
“Comfort?” repeated Margaret scornfully. She rose, in her clinging draperies of chiff on, to place a fresh log on the fire. “If he really loves the other woman, Janet ought to give him up,” she said.
At this Dorothy turned on her. “Would you, if it were George?” she demanded.
For an instant, while she stood there in front of the fire, it seemed to Margaret that the room whirled before her gaze like the changing colours in a kaleidoscope. Then a gray cloud fell over the brightness, and out of this cloud there emerged only the blaze of the red lilies. A pain struck her in the breast, and she remembered the letter she had hidden there.
“Yes,” she answered presently. “I should do it if it were George.”