“Mother went to a great many parties; every one liked her and she liked every one back; so it was easy for her. I used to long for the time when I'd wear a lovely cloak and go out in a little shut motor with a man with pearls; but now that's gone. They want to kiss you so much. I wish that satisfied me. Why doesn't it? Is there anything the matter with me, do you think? I've been told that I haven't any heart.”
As he laughed at her she noticed how absurdly small a cigarette seemed in his broad powerful hand. “What has happened to you is this,” he explained: “a combination of special circumstances has helped you in every way to be what, individually, you were. As a rule, children are brought up in a house of lies, like taking a fine naked body and binding it into hideous rigid clothes. You escaped the damnation of cheap ready-cut morals and education. Your mother ought to have a superb monument—the perfect parent. Of course you haven't a 'heart.' From the standpoint of nature and society you're as depraved as possible. You are worse than any one else here—than all of them rolled together.”
Curiously, she thought, this didn't disturb her, which proved at once that he was right. Linda regarded herself with interest as a supremely reprehensible person, perhaps a vampire. The latter, though, was a rather stout woman who, dressed in frightful lingerie, occupied couches with her arms caught about the neck of a man bending over her. Every detail of this was distasteful.
What was she?
Her attention wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly formed in her mind—the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floor and the divans; the low gurgle of their laughter, the dusky whiteness of their shoulders in the upcoiling incense, the smothered gleams of their hair, with the whispering men, were the world of the grayish-green image.
She explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with a flattering interest. “I expect you're laughing at me inside,” she ended impotently. “And the other, the Greek Victory,” he added, “is the goddess of the other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathen woman should be that.”
Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously. She continued daringly that he might be the sort of man she wanted to marry. But he wouldn't be easy to manage; probably he could not be managed at all. Her mother had always insisted upon the presence of that possibility in any candidate for matrimony. And, until now, Linda's philosophy had been in accord with her. But suddenly she entertained the idea of losing herself completely in—in love.
A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything that she had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innate detachment; on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps this was what she now wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it—just a little, let herself go experimentally. She glanced swiftly at Pleydon, and his bulk, his heavy features, the sullen mouth, appalled her.
Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into her remotest self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him had destroyed a large part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct told her that she couldn't experiment there. It was characteristic that a lesser challenge left her cold. She had better marry as she had planned.
Susanna Noda came up petulantly and sank in a brilliant graceful swirl at his feet. Her golden eyes, half shut, studied Linda intently.