Yet these same words, which came so readily to her imaginings, failed her, as set words will, before the commonplace matter-of-fact reality. If she could have jumped from the dog-cart and dashed into them without preamble, she would have been eloquent enough; but the necessary inquiry if Mrs. Gissing could see her, the ushering in as for an ordinary visit, the brief waiting, the perfunctory hand-shake with the little figure in familiar white-and-blue were so far from the high-strung appeal in her thoughts that they left her silent, almost shy.
"Find a comfy chair, do," came the high, hard voice. "Isn't it dreadfully hot? My old Mai will have it something is going to happen. She has been dikking me about it all the morning. An earthquake, I suppose; it feels like it, rather. Don't you think so?"
Kate felt as if one had come already, as, quite automatically, she satisfied Alice Gissing's choice of "a really--really comfy chair."
How dizzily unreal it seemed! And yet not more so, in fact, than the life they had been leading for months past; knowing the truth about each other absolutely; pretending to know nothing. Well! the sooner that sort of thing came to an end, the better!
"I have had a letter from my husband," she began, but had to pause to steady her voice.
"So I supposed when I saw you," replied Alice Gissing, without a quiver in hers. But she rose, crossed over to Kate, and stood before her, like a naughty child, her hands behind her back. She looked strangely young, strangely innocent in the dim light of the sunshaded room. So young, so small, so slight among the endless frills and laces of a loose morning wrapper. And she spoke like a child also, querulously, petulantly.
"I like you the better for coming, too, though I don't see what possible good it can do. He said in his letter to me he would tell you all about it, and if he has, I don't see what else there is to say, do you?"
Kate rose also, as if to come nearer to her adversary, and so the two women stood looking boldly enough into each other's eyes. But the keenness, the passion, the pity of the scene had somehow gone out of it for Kate Erlton. Her tongue seemed tied by the tameness; she felt that they might have been discussing a trivial detail in some trivial future. Yet she fought against the feeling.
"I think there is a great deal to say; that is why I have come to say it," she replied, after a pause. "But I can say it quickly. You don't love my husband, Alice Gissing, let him go. Don't ruin his life."
Bald and crude as this was in comparison with her imagined appeal, it gave the gist of it, and Kate watched her hearer's face anxiously to see the effect. Was that by chance a faint smile? or was it only the barred light from the jalousies hitting the wide blue eyes?