Mary Cass had come in and very quietly had laid on her forehead a wet handkerchief with eau-de-cologne. Ah! That was better! That was cool. She faded away down into space where there was trouble and disorder and pain, trouble in which she had some share but was too lazy to inquire what.
Then she awoke sharply with a jerk, as though some one had pushed her up out of darkness into light. The Marylebone church clock was striking. First the quarters. Then four o'clock very slowly. . . . She was wide awake now and realized everything. It was the middle of the afternoon and she had been asleep for hours. Her head was still aching very badly but it did not keep her back now as it had done.
She knew now what had happened. She had seen the last of Bunny, the very, very last. She would never see him again, nor hear his voice again, nor feel his kiss on her cheek.
And at first there was the strangest relief. The matter was settled then, and that confusing question that had been disturbing her for so many months. There would be no more doubts about Bunny, whether he were truthful or no, why he did not take her to his mother, whether he would write every day, and why a letter was suddenly cold when yesterday's letter had been so loving, as to why they had so many quarrels. . . . No, no more quarrels, no more of that dreadful pain in the heart and wondering whether he would telephone or whether her pride would break first and she would speak to him. Relief, relief, relief—— Relief connected in some way with the little dancing circle of afternoon sunlight on the white ceiling, connected with the things on her dressing-table, the purple pin-cushion, the silver-backed brushes that Katherine had given her, the slanting sheet of looking-glass that reflected the end of her bed and the chair and the piece of blue carpet. Relief. . . . She turned over, resting her head on her hand, looking at the pearl-grey wall-paper. Relief! . . . and she would never see him again, never hear his voice again! Some one in the room with her uttered a sharp, bitter cry. Who was it? She was alone. Then the knife plunged deep into her heart, plunged and plunged again, turning over and over. The pain was so terrible that she put her hand over her eyes lest she should see this other woman who was there with her suffering so badly. No, but it was herself. It was she who would never see Bunny again, never hear his voice.
She sat up, her hands clenched, summoning control and self-command with all the strength that was in her soul. She must not cry, she must not speak. She must stare her enemy in the face, beat him down. Well, then. She and Bunny were parted. He did not belong to her. He belonged to that poor girl of whose baby he was the father.
She fought then, for twenty minutes, the hardest battle of her life—the struggle to face the facts. The facts were, quite simply, that she could never be with Bunny any more, and worse than that, that he did not belong to her any more but to another woman.
She had not arrived yet at any criticism of him—perhaps that would never be. When a woman loves a man he is a child to her, so simple, so young, so ignorant, that his faults, his crimes, his deceits are swallowed in his babyhood. Bunny had behaved abominably—as ill as any man could behave; she did not yet see his behaviour, but when it came to her she would say that she should have been there to care for him and then it would never have been. She was to remember later, and with a desperate, wounding irony, how years before, when she had been the merest child and Katherine had been engaged to Philip, Henry had discovered that Philip had once in Russia had a mistress who had borne him a child.
Millie, when she had heard this, had poured indignant scorn upon the suggestion that Katherine should leave her lover because of this earlier affair. Had it not all had its history before Katherine had known Philip? How ironic a parallel here! Did not Millie's indignant, brave, fearless youth rise up here to challenge her? No, that other woman had surrendered Philip long, long before. This woman . . . poor child—— Only nineteen and the village mocking her, waiting for her child with scorn and coarse gossip and taunting sneers!
She got up, bathed her face, her eyes dry and hot, her cheeks flaming, brushed her hair and went into the sitting-room.