I was out with Betty and didn’t get home till five. As I came up the stairs I heard voices on the top floor, just a low rise and fall, nothing distinguishing. Since her illness Lizzie keeps her sitting-room door open and I knew the voices were from there. I supposed one of the admirers was with her and went into my rooms and took off my things. Then I thought it would be nice to go up and make them tea. And I went up and it was Roger.
That’s all.
Why should that keep me awake? Why all evening should it have kept coming up between me and the pages I tried to read? Aren’t they both my friends? Why can’t they laugh and talk together and I be contented? And it was all so natural and explicable. Roger had come to my door and, finding me out, had gone up there to wait for me.
But—oh! Why should one woman be beautiful and one plain? Why should one charm without an effort, be lovely with a flower’s unstudied grace, and another stand awkward, chained in a stupid reserve, caught in a web of self-consciousness, afraid of being herself? Why is Lizzie Harris as she is and I as I am? I can’t write any more, I don’t get anywhere. I know it’s all right. I know it, but—something keeps me awake.
XIV
It’s two weeks to-day since that night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s been a horrible two weeks—a sickening, disintegrating two weeks. My existence has been dislocated, thrown wide of its bearings, as if the world had taken a sudden wild revolution, whirled me through space, and I had come up dizzy and bewildered, still in the old setting, but with everything broken and upside down.
It began with that visit of Roger to Lizzie’s sitting-room. The morning after I felt humiliated, utterly ashamed of myself. It’s no new thing for me to be a fool. I permit myself that luxury. But to be a mean-spirited, suspicious fool was indulging myself too far. I saw Lizzie and she spoke about Roger, simply and sweetly, and my folly grew to a monumental size, beneath which I was crushed. And my dread faded as the horror of a nightmare fades when the morning comes, with the sun and the sounds of every day.
I have heard people say that these moments of relief in a period of anxiety are all that enable one to bear the strain. I don’t think that’s true. Alterations of stress and serenity tear one to pieces. If you’re going to be put on the rack it’s better to have no reprieve. Then your mind accepts it, gets accustomed to it and you tune up your nerves, screw your courage to the sticking place and march forward with the calm of the hopeless.
On Sunday afternoon—that was yesterday—Roger and I were to have tea with Mrs. Ashworth. He came earlier than I expected, wanting to take a walk with me before we went there. Lizzie was in my sitting-room, also Miss Bliss, picking over the last box of chocolates contributed by the count. Miss Bliss was not dressed for receiving—instead of the kimono and the safety pin she wore the Navajo blanket, and when she saw him she gave a cry that would have done credit to Susanna when she discovered the elders. I would have seen the humor of it—the model who had posed for the altogether in abject confusion at being caught huddled to the chin in a blanket as thick as a carpet—had I not had all humor stricken from me by the sight of Roger in the doorway. The cry had halted him. He evidently had no idea what had caused it. His eyes swerved from Miss Bliss to sweep the room in a quick questioning glance. When it touched Lizzie something shot up in it—the question was answered. Miss Bliss made her escape without anybody noticing her, and I heard about the walk and went into the back room to get my outdoor things.
I have explained how the kitchenette and bathroom are a connecting passage between the two larger rooms of the suite. I came back through them, and having left the sitting-room door open, could see at the end of the little vista Roger and Lizzie by the table. As once before I had stopped to watch them, I stopped now, not smilingly this time, but furtively, guiltily.