"I have a right to think anything that occurs to me," he corrected quietly, "though I am willing to beg your pardon for putting it into words. Well, since you assure me that you are entirely happy, I can only say that I am overjoyed to hear it."
"I am happy," she insisted passionately; and a little later when she was alone in the street, she told herself that a lie had become more familiar to her than the truth. The conversation with Adams appeared a mistake when she looked back upon it—for instead of lessening it seemed only to increase the weight of her troubles—so she determined presently to think no more either of Adams or of the reasons which had prompted her impulsive visit to him. To forget oneself! Yes, Gerty was right in the end, and the object of all society, all occupations, all amusements, showed to her now as so many unsuccessful attempts to escape the haunting particular curse of personality. Gerty escaped it by her frivolous pursuits and her interminable flirtations, which meant nothing; Kemper escaped it by living purely in the objective world of sense; Adams escaped it—The name checked her abruptly, and she stopped in her thoughts as if a light had flashed suddenly before her eyes. Here, at last, was the explanation of happiness, she felt, and yet she felt also, that it presented itself to her mind in an enigma which she could not solve—for Adams, she recognised, had mastered, not escaped, his personality. The poison of bitterness was gone, but the effectiveness of power was still as great; and his temperament, in passing through the fiery waters of experience, was mellowed into a charm which seemed less a fortunate grace of aspect than the result of a peculiar quality of vision. Was it his own life that had opened his eyes until he could look into the secret chambers in the lives of others?
In Gramercy Park she found Mrs. Payne waiting for her with the carriage, and she accepted almost eagerly the old lady's invitation to spend the morning in a search for hats. At the moment it seemed to her that hats offered as promising an aid to forgetfulness as any other, and she threw herself immediately into the pursuit of them with an excitement which enabled her, for the time, at least, to extinguish the fierce hunger of her soul in supplying the more visible exactions of her body.
At luncheon Gerty appeared, wearing a startling French gown, which, she said, had just arrived that morning. After the first casual greeting they fell into an animated discussion of the choice of veils, during which Gerty declared that Laura had never selected the particular spots which would be most becoming to her features. "You get them too large and too far apart," she insisted, picking up a black net veil from a pile on Laura's table, "even I with my silly nose can't stand this kind."
Laura's eyes were fixed upon her with their singular intensity of look, but in spite of the absorption of her gaze, she had not heard a single word that Gerty uttered.
"Yes, yes, you're right," she said; but instead of thinking of the veils, she was wondering all the time if Gerty had really forgotten her jealousy of Madame Alta and the letter she had burned.
"I shall tell him this afternoon and that will make everything easy," she thought; and when, after a little frivolous conversation Gerty had remembered an engagement and driven hurriedly away, the situation appeared to Laura to have become perfectly smooth again. At the announcement of Kemper's name, she crossed the room to meet him with this impulse still struggling for expression. "I shall tell him now, and then everything will be made easy," she repeated.
But when she opened her lips to speak, she found that the confession would not come into words, and what she really said was:
"It has been a century since yesterday, for I've done nothing but shop."
Laughing he caught her hands, and she saw with her first glance, that he was in one of his ironic moods.