There had been other men who had not proposed marriage. There had been insistent creditors—her mother’s as well as her own. There had been that deep hunger for something approaching a real home, and for a sense of security, in a life necessarily full of insecurities.
Obdurate, difficult theatre managers, powerful, jealous fellow-actresses, ill health, bad luck! Behind the glamour and the glitter of the stage, what a world of carking care, of littleness, meanness, jealousy, and intrigue she had found herself called upon to do battle with.
And now, if only her husband proved amenable, proved livable with, how different everything would be? But in any case Hal must be there. Somehow nothing of all this showed in her face as she fronted the smoker, still blowing clouds of smoke before her eyes.
“What has become of Rod?” Hal asked suddenly.
Lorraine winced a little, but held her ground steadily.
“Rod had to go. What could Rod and I have done with £500 a year?”
“My own”—from the blunt-speaking one—“it surely seems as if you might have thought of that before you allowed Rod to run all over the country after you, and get ‘gated’, and very nearly ‘sent down’, and spend a year or two’s income ahead in trying to give you pleasure.”
Lorraine flung herself down on the sofa with a callous air, and beat her foot on the ground impatiently. The parting with Rod was another thing she did not propose to describe to Hal. It had hurt too badly, for one thing.
“When you moralise, Hal, you are detestable. Besides, it’s so cheap. Any one can sit on a table and hurl sarcasm about. I daresay in my place you would have married Rod, from a sense of duty or something, and ruined all the rest of his life. Or perhaps, after gently breaking the news, you’d have let him come dangling round to be ‘mothered’. Well, I don’t say I haven’t been a bit of a brute to him; but anyhow I tried to do the square thing in the end. I cut the whole affair dead off. I told him I would not see him nor write to him again. I’ve since sent two letters back unopened, and though you mightn’t think it, I was just eating my heart out for a sight of him. But what’s the good! He’s got to follow in the footsteps of whole centuries of highly respectable, complacent, fat old bankers. His father and mother would have a fit if he didn’t develop into the traditional fat old banker himself, and beget another of the same ilk to follow on.
“I daresay with me he would have developed a little more soul, and a little less stomach—but what of it?” with a graceful shrug. “For the good of his country it is written that he shall acquire weight and stolidity, instead of an ideal soul, and for the benefit of posterity I sentenced him to speedy rotundity, and dull respectability, and the begetting of future bankers. He will presently marry some one named Alice or Annie, and invite me to the first christening in a spirit of Christian forgiveness.”