“Go away,” she said—“go away.”
“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt, and stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.
“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps without you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him doggedly on the very edge of the pavement beside her.
Suddenly she slackened her steps.
“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said. “What did you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all the heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it now. You feel like a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the sanctity of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am now.”
She paused, and then she brought out:
“I’ve always wanted men about me, and I mean to have them. You never heard me say a good word for a woman, and I never did say one. I shouldn’t even of your wife. But I am Etta Stackpole, I tell you. The world has got to give me what I want, for it can’t get on without me. Your women might try to down me, but your men wouldn’t allow it.”
Dudley Leicester murmured apologetically, feeling himself a hypocrite: “Why should anyone want to down you?”
“The women would,” she answered. “If ever my name got into the papers they’d manage it too. But that will never happen. You know women are quite powerless until your name does get into the papers. Mine never will; that’s as certain as eggs is eggs. And even if it did, there’s half the hostesses in London would try to bolster me up. Where would their dinners be—where would the Phyllis Trevors be if they hadn’t me for an attraction? ...
“I’m telling you all this, Dudley,” she said, “just to show you what you’ve missed. You’re a bit of a coward, Dudley Leicester, and you threw me over in a panic. You’re subject to panics now, aren’t you—about your liver and the like? But when you threw me over, Dudley, it was the cowardliest thing you ever did.”