"There's not a woman I know who could dress decently on what I have," she rejoined, skilfully adjusting him into the necessity of defence.
He gathered up the papers, and placing them in a drawer of his desk, closed it sharply. There was a sordid indecency about the discussion which stung him like the stroke of a whip.
"I am sorry," he returned coolly, "but I have done my best. There is nothing more to be said." His eyes lingered for a moment on her thin bosom where the bones were beginning to be faintly visible through the ivory flesh. Then he looked at her sharpened face and saw that the three little wrinkles were stamped indelibly between her eyebrows. As he watched her she lifted her head with the babyish tilt he had first seen under cherry-coloured ribbons. "I will find the money to send you to Florida," he said slowly, "if you will promise me—to give up drugs."
She gathered her wraps about her and made a movement as if to leave the room. "Drugs! Why, how ridiculous!" she exclaimed with a laugh, though he felt the cold edge of hatred in her voice.
Still laughing, she went out and up the staircase, and a few minutes afterwards he heard her nervous step in the room above. He took out the bills again and spent half the night in the effort to realise the exact amount of his indebtedness.
CHAPTER XI
IN WHICH A LIE IS THE BETTER PART OF TRUTH
At breakfast Connie did not appear—she had seemed to be asleep when he went into his dressing-room—and it was not until one o'clock that he had a chance to speak to her again. Luncheon was already on the table when he entered the dining-room, and Connie, in a green velvet gown and a little green velvet hat ornamented by a twinkling aigrette, was standing by the window looking out restlessly at the falling snow. As he came in she went over to the table and began making tea with nervous hands. She was apparently in the highest spirits, and while she fumbled noisily with the cups and saucers she rambled on in her expressionless voice with tinkling interludes of her shrill, falsetto laughter. As he watched her in shamed silence he remembered with astonishment that it had taken him almost ten years to find out that Connie was vulgar. Now at last his eyes were opened—he had achieved a standard of comparison and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct, quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised the uselessness of his good intentions toward her—the utter impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the clutch of temperament.
Her day was filled with engagements, she told him at the end of luncheon when she rose to hurry off while he still lingered over his coffee; "and I shan't be here to dine, either," she added, as an after thought. "Gus Brady will come for me—there's the opera and a supper afterwards, so you needn't trouble to sit up."