Lorm began the conversation. “First of all: Is there any folly in your mind that can still be prevented?”
“None,” Judith answered in a frosty tone. “If the condition you made was only a trick to scare me off, and you are cowardly enough to repudiate it at the moment of its fulfilment, then, of course, I have been self-deceived, and my business here is at an end. Don’t soothe me with well-meant speeches. The matter was too serious to me for that.”
“That is sharply and bitterly said, Judith, but terribly impetuous,” Lorm said, with quiet irony. “I’m an old hand at living, and far from young, and a good bit too experienced to fly into the passion of a Romeo at even the most precious offers and surprises of a woman. Suppose we discuss what you’ve done like two friends, and you postpone for a bit any final judgment of my behaviour.”
Judith told him that she had written her father, and requested him to make some other disposition of the annual income which he had settled on her at the time of her marriage, since she had determined to get a divorce from Felix Imhof, and to marry a man who had made this step a definite condition of their union. At the same time she had made a legal declaration of her renunciation before a notary, which she had brought to show Lorm, and intended thereupon to send on to her father. All this she told him very calmly. Felix had known nothing of her intentions at the time of her departure. She had left a note for him in the care of his valet. “Explanations are vain under such circumstances,” she said. “To tell a man whom one is leaving why one is leaving him is as foolish as turning back the hands of the clock in the hope of really bringing back hours that are dead. He knows where I am and what I want. That’s enough. Anyhow, it’s not the sort of thing he comprehends, and there are so many affairs in his busy life that one more or less will make little difference.”
Lorm sat quietly, his head bent forward, his chin resting on the mother-of-pearl handle of his stick. His carefully combed hair, which was brown and still rather thick, gleamed in the light. His brows were knit. In the lines about his nose, and his wearied actor’s mouth, there was a deep joylessness.
A waiter appeared at the door and vanished again.
“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, Judith,” Lorm said, and tapped the floor lightly with his feet.
“Then tell me about it, so that I can adjust myself.”
“I’m an actor,” he said almost threateningly.
“I know it.”