Without looking towards her, Jack Meredith made a few steps towards the door—quietly, self-composedly, with that perfect savoir-faire of the social expert that made him different from other men. Millicent Chyne felt a sudden plebeian desire to scream. It was all so heartlessly well-bred. He turned on his heel with a little half-cynical bow.
“I leave my name with you,” he said. “It is probable that you will be put to some inconvenience. I can only regret that this—denouement did not come some months ago. You are likely to suffer more than I, because I do not care what the world thinks of me. Therefore you may tell the world what you choose about me—that I drink, that I gamble, that I am lacking in—honour! Anything that suggests itself to you, in fact. You need not go away; I will do that.”
She listened with compressed lips and heaving shoulders; and the bitterest drop in her cup was the knowledge that he despised her. During the last few minutes he had said and done nothing that lowered him in her estimation—that touched in any way her love for him. He had not lowered himself in any way, but he had suavely trodden her under foot. His last words—the inexorable intention of going away—sapped her last lingering hope. She could never regain even a tithe of his affection.
“I think,” he went on, “that you will agree with me in thinking that Guy Oscard's name must be kept out of this entirely. I give you carte blanche except that.”
With a slight inclination of the head he walked to the door. It was characteristic of him that although he walked slowly he never turned his head nor paused.
Oscard followed him with the patient apathy of the large and mystified.
And so they left her—amidst the disorder of the half-unpacked wedding presents—amidst the ruin of her own life. Perhaps, after all, she was not wholly bad. Few people are; they are only bad enough to be wholly unsatisfactory and quite incomprehensible. She must have known the risk she was running, and yet she could not stay her hand. She must have known long before that she loved Jack Meredith, and that she was playing fast and loose with the happiness of her whole life. She knew that hundreds of girls around her were doing the same, and, with all shame be it mentioned, not a few married women. But they seemed to be able to carry it through without accident or hindrance. And illogically, thoughtlessly, she blamed her own ill-fortune.
She stood looking blankly at the door which had closed behind three men—one old and two young—and perhaps she realised the fact that such creatures may be led blindly, helplessly, with a single hair, but that that hair may snap at any moment.
She was not thinking of Guy Oscard. Him she had never loved. He had only been one of her experiments, and by his very simplicity—above all, by his uncompromising honesty—he had outwitted her.
It was characteristic of her that at that moment she scarcely knew the weight of her own remorse. It sat lightly on her shoulders then, and it was only later on, when her beauty began to fade, when years came and brought no joy for the middle-aged unmarried woman, that she began to realise what it was that she had to carry through life with her. At that moment a thousand other thoughts filled her mind—such thoughts as one would expect to find there. How was the world to be deceived? The guests would have to be put off—the wedding countermanded—the presents returned. And the world—her world—would laugh in its sleeve. There lay the sting.