It had been a trying week! Another “wooing game.” Polly had “wooed” Geoffrey under her very nose. Exercised every blandishment in her repertory. Anxious when her surgeon was anxious. Gay when his brow relaxed. Sweet, womanly, inexhaustibly and multifariously charming. A white vamp!
And Geoffrey almost clung to her.
She ought to hate her but she didn’t. Odd, but after all, why should she? Certainly, she couldn’t accuse her of treachery; Polly knew nothing of her feeling for Geoffrey. If Mrs. Pleyden had implanted a doubt in her daughter’s egotistical bosom, she had been given the opportunity to pluck it out and had succeeded. She had been sincere enough that day. The lid was still on!
And hadn’t she conclusively renounced Geoffrey Pelham to Polly that night when she had taken out her soul and skewered it? Why shouldn’t someone find happiness in this world if such a thing as happiness really existed?
“Oh, Lord, what a mess!” She sighed. “Eustace wants me. Elsie wants Eustace. Polly wants Geoffrey. Geoffrey wants me. And I? Nothing apparently. I feel as empty as an old hogshead on a junk-pile.”
And in truth she had never, not even in the old days, felt so depressed. This cataclysm had literally left nothing in her life but her manor! Her three friends were lost irretrievably. To resume any sort of relationship with Eustace was unthinkable. Polly would drift away, absorbed in her husband. Elsie had betrayed her.
She felt a deep and harsh resentment toward Elsie. Not for a moment had she believed in the “cold.” That Elsie should have doubted her cut her to the quick. . . . For a night, possibly, shocked as she was, and facing for the first time the fact of her love for the man. But she should have come to her senses before this.
Perhaps she had loved Elsie more than any of the three, and the hurt had gone deeper. Well, she loved her no longer. And she indulged in some bitter musings of her own on the friendship of women.
But she felt terribly alone. Stranded. And she had lost that old boyish independence and hostility to her kind which had made loneliness far from insupportable. Well, she must erect another superstructure.
Polly’s laugh floated up, sustained, as it were, on the deeper notes of her playmate; now quite relieved of anxiety for his distinguished patient and friend. The tapping of her heels became a rat-tat-tat.