“You wish me to decide?”
“Yes,” she said at last.
He looked at her now with the light of pity in his face. Not at once did he speak, and when he did it was with a clear, a too-clear perception of the impotence of his words.
“The truth is,” he said, “the problem is beyond me.”
CHAPTER IX
AN INTERLUDE
I
As Mary made her way from Bridport House across the Park, in the direction of Broad Place and luncheon, it came suddenly upon her that she was in a state of the most abject misery she had ever been in. It was a gorgeous midday of July, but the world had ceased to be habitable. She had come up against a blank wall. At that moment there was nothing in life to make it worth while.
In the ordeal she had just passed through a fierce pride had forbade her to show one glimpse of her real feelings. She had carried off the whole scene with almost an air of comedy, for she was determined that “those people” should not realize what wounds it was in their power to deal. But Dame Nature, now that she had the high-mettled creature to herself, was having something to say to her on the matter. A price was being exacted for these heroics and for this stoicism.
The Duke had left an impression of fine chivalry on a perceptive mind, but in spite of that, now they were no longer face to face, her deepest feeling was an angry resentment. Life was not playing fair. In the course of a strenuous three and twenty years she had rubbed shoulders with all sorts of men and women, but in spite of an honest catholicity of outlook, she had come to the conclusion already that there was only one kind for which she had any real use. It was not a question of loaves and fishes, or a puerile snobbishness; it was simply that one of the deepest instincts she had, the sense of the artist, demanded a setting.
Walking along, blind to everything but the misery of this reaction, she was suddenly brought up short, thrown as it were against the world in its concrete reality, by the knowledge that a pair of eyes was devouring her. Cutting across her path at an acute angle as he converged upon her from the direction of Kensington Gardens was a man wholly absorbed in the occupation of looking at her. With a start she awoke to the force of his gaze; her subconscious perception of it was so strong that it even aroused a tacit hostility.