She smiled at him, more in control of herself now than he.
“No. I am taking Maisie with me,” she said with deliberate calmness.
“But you can’t! I will not allow it!”
“Perhaps you propose to sit here all day and watch her?” she asked, with biting sarcasm. Then, with a sudden change of tone, indignation flamed up in her. “What is she to you?—Is she any more to you than I am?—Do you see her from one month’s end to another?—Do you ask after her? Do you write to her? Do you take the faintest interest in her?—No!—Once you leave this flat and go to your hateful paper, you forget her as utterly as you do me!” Her eyes blazed at him. “Maisie and I are all the world to each other, Jack! And we will not be separated! We go together!”
The violence of this outburst from the woman whose docility he had so long accepted as naturally as he did that of his staff upon the Rostrum shocked him profoundly. At the same time, a blinding passion of jealousy surged up in him.
“You shall not go!”
“I shall!” There was no mistaking the determination in her voice. “The moment your back is turned!”
The room seemed to reel about him. The hitherto so solid foundations of his existence had broken up suddenly beneath him. He could not have suspected so great a capacity for emotion in himself. He pressed his hand against his brow, closed his eyes tight in the sickening shock.
“Who is it?” he asked hoarsely. “The man?—His name?”
Her eyes seemed to be probing the depth of his wound as they looked into his, but they showed no compassion.