“But where is she?” Grimshaw asked.
“Oh, well, you’re a man who knows everything,” she answered. “I expect she’s gone to one of the six or seven of her patients that are always clamouring for her. You’d better hurry to find her, or she’ll be off touring round the world before you know where you are.... I’ve always thought,” she continued, “that you handled her wrongly at the beginning. If the moment she’d begun that nonsense, you’d taken a stick to her, or dragged her off to a registry office, or contrived to pretend to be harsh and brutal, she’d have given in right at once; but she got the cranky idea into her head, and now it’s hardened into sheer pride. I don’t believe that she really wanted it then, after the first day or two. She only wanted to bring you to your knees. If you had given in then, she’d have backed out of it at the last moment, and you’d have had St. George’s and orange-blossoms, and ‘The Voice that breathed o’er Eden’ all complete.”
“Well, I can’t bother about it any longer,” Grimshaw said. “I’m done. I give in.”
“Good old Toto,” Ellida said. And then she dropped her voice to say: “I don’t know that it’s the sort of thing that a sister ought to encourage a sister doing, but if you managed not to let anyone know—and that’s easy enough, considering how you’ve set everybody talking about your quarrels. You can just meet her at Athens, and then come back and say you’ve made it up suddenly, and got married at the Consulate at Scutari or Trebizond, or some old place where there isn’t a Consulate, and nobody goes to—if nobody knows about it, I don’t see that I need bother much.” She looked up at him and continued: “I suppose you’ll think I’m immoral or whatever it is; but, after all, there was mother, who was really the best woman in the world. Of course I know you think of the future, but when everything’s said and done, I’m in the same position that your children will be, and it doesn’t worry me very much. It doesn’t worry Katya either, though she likes to pretend it does.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking of anything at all,” Grimshaw answered. “I just give in. I just want the ... the peace of God.”
She looked up at him with her eyes slightly distended and wondering.
“Are you,” she said, “quite sure that you will get it? Katya is a dear, of course, but she’s the determination of a tiger; she has been play-acting from the first, and she has meant to have you since you were in your cradles together. But she’s meant to have you humbled and submissive, and tied utterly hand and foot. I don’t believe she ever meant not to marry you. I don’t believe she means it now, but she means to make you give in to her before she marries you. She thinks it will be the final proof of your passion for her.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “I don’t know and I don’t care. What I want is to have things settled. What does it matter whether it’s for life or death?”
“And Pauline Leicester?” Mrs. Langham asked.
Robert Grimshaw made a little motion with his thumb and fingers, as if he were crumbing between them a little piece of dried earth.