"You mean you couldn't give him up?"
"When I'm dead I may, not before." She closed her eyes and a long shudder ran through her body. "It has been nothing but a fight since I married—a fight to keep him. I used to think that marriage meant rest, contentment, but I know now that it means a battle—all the time—every instant. I've never had one natural moment, I've never since the beginning been without a horrible suspicion—and I see now that I never shall be. He likes me best I know—in his heart he really puts me first—but there are others and I won't have it. I'll be alone, I'll be the only one or nothing. I said I wouldn't be beaten the first time, and I won't—I won't be beaten." She paused an instant to draw breath. "And I haven't been," she wound up in bitter triumph.
"You'll never be, darling," declared Laura; "who is there on earth to shine against you?"
The violence faded from Gerty's face, yielding to an expression of disgust, of spiritual loathing—the loathing of a creature that hates the thing it loves.
"But it isn't worth it, it isn't worth it," she moaned, pushing the papers away from her with an indignant gesture, and rising from her chair to walk hurriedly up and down the floor. "It isn't worth it, but I'm bound to it—I can't get away. I'm bound to the wheel. Do you think if I could help myself—if I could be different—that I would turn into a mere bond-slave to my body? Why, a day labourer has rest, but I haven't. There's not a moment when I'm not doing something for my beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing a treatment. I never sleep as I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like. It's all somebody's system for preserving something about me. I've lived on celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to keep from getting thin—and yet I never wake up in the morning that I don't turn sick for fear I'll discover my first wrinkle in the glass. Now imagine," she finished with a cynical laugh, "Perry going upon a diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to retain my affection!"
"I can't," confessed Laura bluntly, "it's beyond me, but I wish you wouldn't. I wish you'd try to hold him by something different—something higher."
"You can't hold a person by what he hasn't got," returned Gerty with the flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to—a ridicule which she used as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband. Then, after a pause, she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner. "A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any agony—I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about. Yet they must come—they're obliged to come in fifteen—ten—perhaps in five years. Perhaps even to-morrow. Do you suppose," she questioned abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, "that when one gets old one really ceases to mind—that one dies out all inside—the sensations I mean, and the emotions—before the husk begins to wither?" She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light. The change was so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight vagueness into a conspicuous prominence. On a chair in the corner was carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the wearer's feet. The pathos which seems so often to dwell in trifling inanimate objects spoke to Laura from the little discarded shoes, and again society appeared to her as a hideous battle in which the passions preyed upon the ideals, the body upon the soul. She thought of Perry Bridewell, of his healthy animalism, his complacent self-esteem, while her heart hardened within her. Was love, when all was said, merely a subjection to the flesh instead of an enlargement of the spirit? Did it depend for its very existence upon the dress-maker's art and the primitive instinct of the chase? Had it no soul within it to keep it clean? Could it see or hear only through the eye or the ear of sense?
"O Gerty, Gerty," she said, "if I could only make you see!"
But Gerty, with one of those swift changes of humour which made her moods at once so unexpected and so irresistible, had burst into a peal of mocking laughter.
"I'm prepared to conquer or to die," she said merrily; and going to a large white box on the bed, she opened it and dangled in the air a gorgeous evening gown of silver gauze shot with green. "This cost me a thousand dollars," she commented in the hard, business-like tones Laura had begun to dread. "I was keeping it for the ball next week, but there's no call like the call of an emergency. The horrid creature he fancies will be there," she added, surveying her exquisite armful with an admiring, unhappy glance, "and it will be war to the death between us, if it costs him every cent he has." She fell thoughtfully silent, to break out at the end of a minute or two with a remark which had the value of an imparted confidence: "She—I mean the creature—wore one something like it, only not nearly so handsome—last night—and it made her look frightfully gone off—even Perry noticed it."