As soon as her first interest in the American’s society began to pall a little, she cast about in her mind for some further way of causing discomfort and agitation to the object of her hatred.
Only those who have taken the trouble to watch carefully what might be called the “magnetic antagonism,” between feminine animals condemned to live in close relations with one another, will understand the full intensity of what this young person felt. It was not necessarily a sign of any abnormal morbidity in our fair-haired friend.
For a man in whom one is interested, even though such interest be mild and casual, to show a definite tendency to take sides against one, on behalf of one’s friend, is a sufficient justification,—at least so nature seems to indicate—for the awakening in one’s heart of an intense desire for revenge. Such desire is often aroused in the most well-constituted temperaments among us, and in this case it might be said that the sound physical nerves of the daughter of the Romers craved the satisfaction of such an impulse with the same stolid persistence as her flesh and blood craved for air and sun. But how to achieve it? What new and elaborate humiliation to devise for this irritating partner of her days?
The bathing episode was beginning to lose its piquancy. Custom, with its kindly obliviousness, had already considerably modified Lacrima’s fears, and there had ceased to be for Gladys any further pleasure in displaying her aquarian agility before a companion so occupied with the beauty of lawn and garden at that magical hour.
Fate, however, partial, as it often is, to such patient tenacity of emotion, let fall at last, at her very feet, the opportunity she craved.
She had just begun to experience that miserable sensation, so sickeningly oppressive to a happy disposition, of hating where she could not hurt, when, one evening, news was brought to the house by Mark Purvis the game-keeper that a wandering flock of wild-geese had taken up its temporary abode amid the reeds of Auber Lake. Mr. Romer himself soon brought confirmation of this fact.
The birds appeared to leave the place during the day and fly far westward, possibly as far as the marshes of Sedgemoor, but they always returned at night-fall to this new tarrying ground.
The very evening of this exciting discovery, Gladys’ active mind formulated a thrilling and absorbing project, which she positively trembled with longing to communicate to Lacrima. She found the long dinner that night, and the subsequent chatter with Dangelis on the terrace, almost too tedious to be endured; and it was at an unusually early hour that she surprised her cousin by joining her in her room.
The Pariah was seated at her mirror, wearily reducing to order her entangled curls, when Gladys entered. She looked very fragile in her white bodice and the little uplifted arms, that the mirror reflected, showed unnaturally long and thin. When one hates a person with the sort of massive hatred such as, at that time, beat sullenly under Gladys’ rounded bosom, every little physical characteristic in the object of our emotion is an added incentive to our revengeful purpose.
This Saturnian planetary law is unfortunately not confined to antipathies between persons of the same sex. Sometimes the most unhappy results have been known to spring from the manner in which one or another, even of two lovers, has lifted chin or head, or moved characteristically across a room.