"In all this," continued Irene, "there's no reason why you shouldn't stay here. Everything, you may be sure, will be settled very quietly. My father is a reasonable man."
After a short reflection, Olga said that she could not yet make up her mind. And therewith ended their dialogue. Each was glad to go apart into privacy, to revolve anxious thoughts, and to seek rest.
That her father was "a reasonable man," Irene had always held a self-evident proposition. She had never, until a few days ago, conceived the possibility of a conflict between his ideas of right and her own. Domestic discord was to her mind a vulgar, no less than an unhappy, state of things. Yet, in the step she was now about to take, could she feel any assurance that Dr. Derwent would afford her the help of his sympathy—or even that he would refrain from censure? Reason itself was on her side; but an otherwise reasonable man might well find difficulty in acknowledging it, under the circumstances.
The letter to Arnold Jacks was already composed; she knew it by heart, and had but to write it out. In the course of a sleepless night, this was done. In the early glimmer of a day of drizzle and fog, the letter went to post.
There needed courage—yes, there needed courage—on a morning such as this, when the skyless atmosphere weighed drearily on heart and mind, when hope had become a far-off thing, banished for long months from a grey, cold world, to go through with the task which Irene had set herself. Could she but have slept, it might have been easier for her; she had to front it with an aching head, with eyes that dazzled, with blood fevered into cowardice.
Dr. Derwent was plainly in no mood for conversation. His voice had been seldom heard during the past week. At the breakfast-table he read his letters, glanced over the paper, exchanged a few sentences with Eustace, said a kind word to Olga; when he rose, one saw that he hoped for a quiet morning in his laboratory.
"Could I see you for half an hour before lunch, father?"
He looked into the speaker's face, surprised at something unusual in her tone, and nodded without smiling.
"When you like."
She stood at the window of the drawing-room, looking over the enclosure in the square, the dreary so-called garden, with its gaunt leafless trees that dripped and oozed. Opposite was the long facade of characterless houses, like to that in which she lived; the steps, the door-columns, the tall narrow windows; above them, murky vapour.