“If she . . .”
“If you want her, there can be no conditions. . . .”
“But she . . .”
Serge saw that it was hopeless. Basil was clinging to his grievances, nursing them, cherishing them. They had become more precious to him than his own happiness, than his wife, than the well-being of his children. . . . Still there was hope that on Minna’s side there might be magnanimity and generosity enough to uproot the thick-set hedge with which Basil had surrounded himself.
Minna was in rooms in the Marylebone Road, near Madame Tussaud’s. She had a woman friend with her, a queer inanimate creature who looked as though she had stepped out of the waxworks—a model of Nell Gwynne. Minna seemed quite happy. She was lying on a sofa eating Turkish delight and reading “Jane Eyre.” She dropped her book as Serge entered and her friend glided away.
“I am glad to see you,” she said. “It’s so dull. Isn’t it a beastly business?”
“I’ve just been to see Basil.”
“Is he still weeping?”
Serge ignored that question and asked her another.
“What’s the trouble between you two?”