'Oh, Mr. Lennox, I'm so sorry for you.'
A little sympathetic conversation followed; and Dick went off to meet Laura, whom he recognized in the woman who leaned over the railings between the pillars, seemingly attracted by the view across Trafalgar Square. She still wore her green silk dress, the one which he had first seen her in on the pier at Hastings, and the long draggled feather boa.
'She doesn't spend money on dress,' he thought as he lifted his hat with not quite the same ceremonious gesture as usual, for he didn't wish to exhibit his scars yet.
'So here you are, Dick, and I waiting for you on the steps of this gallery, glorious with all the imaginations of the heroes.'
'She hasn't seen the scratches yet,' he said to himself, and turned from the light instinctively, preferring that she should make the discovery indoors, rather than out of doors. His wounds would appear less in the gallery than in the open air. 'Why didn't she take a little more trouble with her make-up?' he asked himself, and then reproved himself for describing it as a make-up. 'She's not made up,' he said to himself, 'she's painted,' and he wondered how it was that she could plaster her dark skin so flagrantly with carmine, and put her eyebrows so high up in the forehead. 'Yet the face,' he said, 'is a finely moulded one, and compelling when she forgets her cosmetics,' and while Dick regretted that she didn't show more skill with these, he heard her telling him that she would prefer to stop and talk with him in the gallery devoted to the Italian pictures than elsewhere; 'the sublime conceptions of Raphael raise me above myself.' And then, as if afraid that her words would seem vainglorious to Dick, she said: 'You're always in the same mood, never rising above yourself or sinking below yourself, finding it difficult to understand the pain that those who live mostly in the spiritual plane experience lest they fall into a lower plane. Not that I regard you, Dick, as a lower plane, but your plane is not mine, and that is why you're so necessary to me, and why, perhaps, I'm so necessary to you, or would be if I'm not. Come, let us sit here in front of the Raphael and talk, since we must, of comic opera. It's a pity we're not talking of the Parcoe who have been in my mind all the morning,' and she began to recite some verses that she had written. But, interrupting herself suddenly, she cried: 'Dick, who has been scratching you? How did your face get torn like that—who's been scratching you?' and Dick answered:
'My wife.'
'Your wife? But you never told me that you were married.'
'If I'd told you I was married I would have had to tell you that my wife is a drunkard and is rapidly drinking herself to death, a thing that no man likes to speak about.'
'My poor friend, I didn't mean to reprove you. How did all this come about?'
It wouldn't do to admit that Kate had discovered Laura's letters and poems in his pockets, and so he told the story of a former experience with his wife, and had barely finished it when Laura begged of him to tell her how he had met his wife. And when he had told her the story, to which she listened solemnly, she answered, and there was the same gravity in her voice as in her face: 'All this comes, my dear Dick, of lewdness.'