“But I don’t want either to give or to sacrifice,” Petra protested. “If the two thousand is mine, I shall spend it just as I have been spending it the last three years. Is it mine, or isn’t it mine, Clare? That is what I asked you.”
Clare’s glance just flickered in Lewis’ direction. But she did not want him to read the gratification in it and she put her hand to her cheek quickly, shading her eyes. She said, “Darling, unless you will look up some charity, get interested in it, and give the second thousand there, it can’t be yours any more. Not now—when I have been seeing things through Doctor Pryne’s clear vision. But surely—”
Lewis wanted to stop the woman, wanted to undo all that he himself had so crudely brought about. But he might as well have tried to push back an oncoming steam roller as turn Clare from her honorable participation in this dramatic scene that he himself, no other, had staged. He felt this and held his peace, knowing all the while that he had blundered irreparably and made things worse for Petra than they already had been, in some mysterious way that he was not yet in a position to understand.
Petra had interrupted Clare. Her anger had now risen to the level of her astonishment. “It’s absolutely unfair,” she cried, her young face and her young voice ablaze with wrath. “It is a salary you are cutting, Clare Otis-Farwell! Not a mere allowance. Does Doctor Pryne know that? And you do it casually, like this, at his mere suggestion. I earn every penny of it.”
“What in heaven’s name do you mean?” For that instant Clare forgot Lewis as audience. Her expression was simply dumbfounded, with for once nothing subtle about it. “You earn two thousand dollars a year! Why, you don’t even make your own bed!”
“But I do earn it, all the same. Every dollar of it. By being around all the while as evidence of your generosity and goodness! Everybody praises you for it! And you hope it will make my father keep on adoring you as he has never kept on adoring his other wives. I am a perpetual reminder to him of how you differ from all the others. You are maternal! Haven’t I let you play your part? Haven’t I played mine? What have I done to spoil the picture? Surely you’ve thought it worth a miserable two thousand!”
Clare was on her feet, every tinge of color whipped by Petra’s cruel, wild words from her unrouged face.
“Petra! Hush! Are you crazy?”
Petra, too, was up. And then Lewis noticed that he himself was standing! There was nothing he could say or do, however. He felt as if his own poisonous thoughts about Clare Farwell had been, through some fault of his own, broadcast through Petra’s sibyllic lips. All the blame for the whiplash words, for the cruel scorn of them and their hatred, was his. Not Petra’s. It was he, Lewis, who had thought them and now they were brashly vocal.
But now suddenly again Petra’s voice was her own, and the words were her own, no sibyl’s. “Oh, Clare!” she was faltering. “I am sorry. I am terribly sorry. I was crazy, yes.—” And then, looking at Lewis, in a different and utterly cold tone, she asked surprisingly, “How much does eighteen a week make it a year, Doctor Pryne? Eighteen times fifty-two, do you know?”