"It is rather a duck," said Mary, reading Desire's admiring glance. "Quite French, I think. But of course, as a bride, you will have oceans of lovely things. I adore trousseaux. Perhaps you will show me some of your pretties?" (The bride's gowns, she admitted, might be passable but what really tells the tale is the underneaths.)
"Oh, with pleasure." Desire's assent was instant and warm. "I shall love to let you see my things."
It was risky—but effective. Mary's desire to see the trousseau evaporated on the instant. No girl would be so eager to show things which were not worth showing. And Mary was no altruist to rejoice over other people's Paris follies.
After all, she really knew very little about Benis's wife. And you never can tell. She began to wish that she had brought down with her some very special glories—things she had decided not to waste on Bainbridge. Her young hostess had eyes which were coolly, almost humorously, critical. "Absurd in a girl who simply can't have any proper criteria!" thought Miss Davis crossly.
"When you are quite rested," said Desire kindly, "you will find us on the west lawn. The sun is never too hot there in the morning."
"Yes—I remember that." The faintest sigh disturbed the laces of Mary's matinee. Her faun-like eyes looked wistful. "But if you do not mind, I think I shall be really lazy—these colds do leave one so wretched."
Desire agreed that colds were annoying. She had not missed the sigh which accompanied Mary's memory of the west lawn and very naturally misread it. Mary's regretful decision to challenge no morning comparison in the sunlight on any lawn was interpreted as regret of a much more tender nature. Desire's eyes grew cold and dark with shadow as she left her charming visitor to her wistful rest.
That Mary Davis was the lady of her husband's one romance, she had no longer any doubt. Anyone, that is, any man, might love deeply and hopelessly a woman of such rare and subtle charm. Possessing youth in glorious measure herself, Desire naturally discounted her rival's lack of it. With her, the slight blurring of Mary's carefully tended "lines," the tired look around her eyes, the somewhat cold-creamy texture of her delicate skin, weighed nothing against the exquisite finish and fine sophistication which had been the gift of the added years.
In age, she thought, Mary and Benis would rank each other. They were also essentially of the same world. Neither had ever gazed through windows. Both had been free of life from its beginning. Love between them might well have been a fitting progression.
The one fact which did not fit in here was this—in the story as told by Benis the affair had been one of unreciprocated affection. This presupposed a blindness on the lady's part which Desire began increasingly to doubt. She had already reached the point when it seemed impossible that anyone should not admire what to her was entirely admirable. Even the explanation of a prior attachment (the "Someone Else" of the professor's story), did not carry conviction. Who else could there be—compared with Benis?