She shrugged her white shoulders distastefully. “Oh, he died in a sanitarium in California several years ago, eaten up with drugs and baffled ambition.”
“And languishing away without his favourite pastime of beating the lovely Mrs. Lindsay black and blue, I suppose?”
Mrs. Dane controlled a tremor of annoyance. She disliked flippancy and she disliked grimness; combined she found them irritating to a really incredible degree. “Curran never subjected Lilah to physical maltreatment,” she said coldly, “he subjected her to something a thousand times more intolerable—his adoration.”
“So the beast adored her?”
“He was mad about her. You find that unlikely?”
“On the contrary,” replied O’Hara amiably, “I find it inevitable. But what happened to his brilliant career?”
“Oh, he was crazily, insanely jealous—and some devil chose to send him an anonymous letter in the middle of a crucial party contest when his presence was absolutely vital, saying that Lilah was carrying on an affair with an artist in California, where he’d left her for the winter. He went raving mad—threw up the whole thing—told his backers that they could go to Hell, he was going to California—and he went, too.”
“Ah, Antony, Antony!” O’Hara said softly.
Mrs. Dane stared at him, wide-eyed. “Why, what do you mean? Have you heard the story before?”
“It sounds, somehow, vaguely familiar,” he told her. “There was a woman in Egypt—no—that was an older story than this. Well, what did the beast find?”