“What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m not going to stand it any longer,” she said. “I’m not going to be put on one side like dirt while you go on with your conceited talk. You’re both so conceited you don’t know how to hold yourselves. I’m a woman, and I stand for something in the world. A woman is more important than the biggest picture that was ever painted.”
“It depends upon the woman.”
“All right, then. I’m more important. You talk about Logan keeping me. He can consider himself damned lucky I stay with him.”
“Oh! you’re both in luck,” snapped Mendel, and he sat down and refused to say another word.
Oliver began to whistle and then to hum. She fidgeted in her chair. She thought she had come off rather well in the sparring match. She had been dreading Mendel’s return, for since the Paris adventure she had been asserting herself, as she called it, beating Logan down, bewildering him with her extraordinary sweetness and cajolery and sudden outbursts of fury. Both had agreed to bury the memory of the last night in Paris, but the thoughts of both were centred upon it. She rejoiced that she had served him out, but she had been stirred to a degree that alarmed her. Her former condition of lazy sensual security had been broken, and she dreaded Logan’s jealousy. She knew that she was not his equal in force, but she set herself to overcome him with cunning. His force would spend itself. She knew that. She must then bind him fast with tricks and lures, rouse the curiosity of his senses and keep it unsatisfied.
She had succeeded wonderfully. Logan crumbled and turned soft and sugary under her arts, and only one impulse in him resisted her—his love for Mendel; and through that love his passion for art. Therefore she dreaded and hated Mendel’s return.
Presently she ceased to hum. She thought suddenly that perhaps it had been a mistake to meet Mendel with hostility.
“I say, Kühler, do give us one of your cigarettes. These are awful muck.”