“There is no need to soil your ears with his history,” Mr Graynor replied. “His wife divorced him two years ago. I understood he was abroad.”
“Oh!” said Prudence, and felt oddly chilled by this revelation.
She had liked the man, had hoped that the acquaintance so informally begun would develop pleasantly on ordinary lines, a hope which she realised very certainly could never be fulfilled. Further intercourse would be forbidden her. Though had the road been open to a pursuance of the acquaintance Prudence herself would no longer have wished to follow it up. The colour had gone out of the pleasure and left a neutral-toned picture in its stead, a picture of life in its least lovely aspect, with the sordid streak of self-indulgence trailing its disfiguring smudges across the canvas. Was nothing that was pleasant altogether fine? In this complex meandering of human destinies was this mean streak, which spoilt the fine grain of the wood, discoverable in each separate individual?
Prudence lay back against the cushions feeling utterly weary and unable to cope with the rush of swift emotions which flooded her mind. Reaction followed upon the period of excitement. She was conscious only of the pain in her foot. No one had thought of removing her shoe. She had loosened it in the car; but the foot had swollen and felt too big for its covering. She made an effort now to remove the shoe, whereupon Agatha, capable but unsympathetic, came to her assistance.
“You ought to have done that before,” she complained petulantly, and to her own surprise, as well as to her sister’s, broke down and cried weakly.
Chapter Sixteen.
Though not serious, Prudence’s injuries confined her to the house for some time. It proved an irksome time for the members of her family as well as for herself. She was not patient, and it exasperated her to be compelled to lie on the sofa, unequal to rising from it and running away when her sisters, from a sense of duty, installed themselves near her couch with the sociable intention of keeping her company. They insisted on her occupying herself with some sewing as a relief to the tedium of enforced inaction. Prudence hated sewing, and made a demand for books; whereupon her sisters in turn read aloud to her the works of Miss Nouchette Carey, which were familiar to Prudence from childhood, and bored her exceedingly. She wanted something more stimulating; something which did not depict Wortheton ideals and sentiment. But the more modern writers were banned as unwholesome, and the poets were discredited on account of an erotic tendency to idealise passion and adorn sensuousness with an exalted language better suited to more spiritual qualities. Or so Miss Agatha thought.
“The merit of a book,” she affirmed, “depends upon whether it stands the test of being read aloud without causing embarrassment to the reader and to the audience.”