Walking at her side, now that she had repulsed him, Dudley Leicester had the sensation of being deserted and cold. He had, too, the impulse to offer her his arm again and the desire to come once more within the circle of warmth and perfume that she threw out. The quiet, black, deserted streets, with the gleam from lamps in the shining black glass of windows, the sound of his footsteps—for her tread was soundless, as if she moved without stepping—the cold, the solitude, all these things and her deep-thrilled voice took him out of himself, as if into some other plane. It was, perhaps, into a plane of the past, for that long, early stage of his life cast again its feeling over him. He tried to remember Pauline; but it was with a sense of duty, and memory will not act at the bidding of duty.
No man, indeed, can serve two women—no man, at any rate, who is essentially innocent, and who is essentially monogamous as was Dudley Leicester.
“... The cowardliest thing you ever did in your life,” he heard her repeat, and it was as if in trying to remember Pauline, he were committing a new treachery to Etta Stackpole.
“... For it wasn’t because you were afraid of my betraying you—you knew I shouldn’t betray you—it was because you were afraid of what the other women would say. You knew I should be justified in my actions, but you were afraid of their appearance. You’re a hypochondriac, Dudley Leicester. You had a panic. One day you will have a panic, and it will pay you out for dropping me. It’ll do more than pay you out. You think you’ve taken a snug sort of refuge in the arms of a little wife who might be a nun out of a convent, but it’ll find you.”
Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world.
“And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued, “that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game—if you had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little sheepish—I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it through....
“But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think you’ve had enough gruel....
“All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “you did call me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.”
He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no more than “see Etta home”—as he had seen her home a thousand times before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him. For, when they had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred times—after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled with gloom. And always—always—just as now, she had contrived to put him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her with a little present of no value.
And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her a bunch of jonquils!