"We are wasting time," she said. "I always drive before dinner, and I cannot go out in a tea-gown." She paused a moment to summon from her resources the words that would humiliate him most and slake the desire for vengeance that shrieked within her. She had never hated any one so bitterly before, not even in her youth, when snubs were frequent. For the third time she watched a coronet slip through her strong determined impotent fingers. She could forgive her husband and Brathland their untimely deaths, but for this young man, passionately in love with her, who tossed the dazzling prize aside as an actor might a "property crown," she felt such a rage of hatred that for almost a moment she thought of giving her inherited self the exquisite satisfaction of scratching his eyes out. But it was too late in her day to be wholly natural, and, indeed, she preferred the weapons the world and her ambitions had given her. As he rose and stared at her doubtingly, she said, without a high or a sharp note, in her clear lisping voice:
"I think it wise to put an end to all this by telling you that I was engaged to Lord Brathland when he died. I was more in love with him than I ever shall be with any one again. You caught me in the violence of the rebound, for I was confused with grief, and distraction was welcome: you are always sufficiently amusing. I have not the least idea it would ever have come off, for, to tell you the truth, my friend, you are too hopelessly the enfant gaté for a woman who is neither young enough nor old enough to crave youth on any terms. As a husband, I fear, not to put too fine a point on it, you would be a bore. At the risk of being thought a snob—to which I am quite indifferent—I will add that as plain John Gwynne you seem to have so shrunk in size as to have become as insignificant as most men are, no doubt, when you catch a glimpse of their unmanufactured side. However"—with the air of a great lady dismissing an object of patronage—"I wish you good-fortune, and sincerely hope that we shall one day read of John Gwynne, senator, and recall for a moment the brilliant Elton Gwynne so long forgotten in this busy London of ours."
During quite half of her discourse Gwynne had felt his soul writhe under a rain of hot metal, gibber towards some abyss where it could hide its humiliation and its scars for ever. His brain seemed vacant and his very nostrils turned white. But like many clever people goaded to words by a furious sense of failure, she overshot her mark, and before she finished his pride had made a terrified rebound and taken complete possession of him. He still felt stripped, lashed, a presumptuous youth before a scornful woman in the ripeness of her maturity, but it was imperative for his future self-respect that he should reassert his manhood and retire in good order. He let her finish, and then, as she stood with a still impatience, he lifted his eyes and drew himself up. His face was devoid of expression. His eyes did not even glitter; he might have been listening with voluntary politeness to the speech of majesty laying a corner-stone.
"You are quite right," he said. "You have given me the drubbing I deserve, and I am grateful to you. It was the only thing I needed to snap my last tie with England and brace me for the struggle in America. It emboldens me to ask another favor—that you will regard what I have told you of my plans as confidential. I shall give out that I am going to travel for a time. As I believe I mentioned, I do not wish to be recognized in the United States; and that by the time I have made my new name my old one will be forgotten, is one of the sure points upon which I have reckoned. Have I your promise?"
"My oath!" she said, flippantly; and although she was not generous enough to admire, and still felt as if the world itself were a corpse, every inherited instinct in her united in a visible respect for a poise that was a gift of the centuries, not a deftly manufactured mask.
She rang the bell and extended her hand. Gwynne shook it politely; and a moment later was walking down Park Lane in that singular state of elation that in mercurial natures succeeds one of the brutal blows of life, when all the forces of the spirit have leaped to the rescue.