Should she ask her husband for a divorce; revenge herself by becoming an English duchess? Ora, in the moment or two they had found together at the station, had told her that Mowbray’s older brother was at Davos, unmistakably dying of tuberculosis, and that his engagement, insisted upon by his father, had been broken. Valdobia had given her this news in his last letter, adding the hope that his friend would bring Ida back with him that they might all be together once more.
Was this the solution of her problem? A marriage that would demonstrate to Gregory Compton that her moment of seeming weakness was mere coquetry; a marriage that would raise her an immeasurable social distance above him; a permanent dissociation from everything that could remind her of him and this terrible obsession that had disorganised her being, reduced her to the grovelling level of the women whose dependence on the favour of man she had always despised?
When she reflected that her revenge would fall flat, Gregory’s not being the order of mind to appreciate the social pre-eminence of a titled race, she ground her teeth, again. There was nothing left but to consider herself. Should she choose the part that not only would exalt her station and fill her life with the multifarious interests of a British peeress, but banish this man in time from her memory; or stay on and alternate torments with moments of indescribable sweetness when he smiled upon her? And might she not yet manipulate him into her net if she continued to play the waiting game? Or would she go wholly to pieces the first time they were alone together?
Her pride strangled at this possibility and brought her to her feet. The blood was still boiling in her head, she knew what nerves were for the first time in her life. She made up her mind to go out and walk. In this part of the town she was not likely to meet anyone.
She found another hat, put on a warm coat, and let herself out of the house. It was ten o’clock. All the West Side, no doubt, was at the Country Club.
For a time she walked rapidly and aimlessly, trying to focus her mind on other things. But when a woman is in love and the path is stony, she is obsessed much as people are that suffer from shock and reiterate ceaselessly the circumstances of its cause. Her brain seethed with hate, longed for revenge. Nothing would have gratified her more than to take the secret revenge of infidelity. Many a woman has taken a lover for the satisfaction of laughing to herself at her husband’s dishonour; to dishonour being the most satisfactory of all vengeance, whether open or concealed.
She realised abruptly that her thoughts had led her unconsciously to the door of John Mowbray’s lodgings. The flat had been lent him by a banker to whom he had brought a letter from his brother, and who had gone East immediately after his arrival; the banker’s wife lived in Southern California. It occupied the second story of a house in West Broadway and had its own entrance on a side street. Mowbray had given a tea there a day or two before, and Ida had presided.
She did not delude herself for a moment that she could take her full revenge upon the unconscious Gregory, but at least she could do something quite shocking, something that would infuriate a husband. Ida was not afraid of any man, least of all one that wished to make a duchess of her, but it would be an additional satisfaction to torment him, and an adventure with a spice of danger in it no doubt would restore her equilibrium. If Mowbray made violent love to her she felt, by some obscure process of feminine logic, that she would forgive Gregory Compton.
She glanced hastily up and down the street, then more sharply, wondering if she had dreamed that once or twice she had looked over her shoulder with the sense of being followed. It was a bright moonlight night. No one was in sight. She rang the bell of Mowbray’s flat. The door was opened from above. At the head of the stairs stood the Jap who served as housekeeper and valet.
She hesitated a moment, taken aback. She had forgotten the servant. Then she closed the door behind her. “Is Lord John in?” she asked negligently.