She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda Hallet—in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like nonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be explained, for example, to the man who had every right, every evidence, to consider himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible of explanation. Absolutely nothing! There was the earth, which appeared to be everything, the houses you entered, the streets you passed over, the people among whom you lived, yet that wasn't all. Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant compared with—with other facts latent in the mind and blood.
Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always been hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid the slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie scoffed. When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it merely as a deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that she, Linda Condon, was unspeakably insulted.
She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened—to her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no intention of submitting to the coarse hands and ropes of public affront. Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her person, she had hated to be touched.
Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound into Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it existence would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.
She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping with a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in herself, nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda recognized this without any knowledge of what reparation it would find. She wasn't concerned with that, a small detail. It would be apparent. Arnaud was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She saw him as if at the distant end of a dull corridor—as she looked back. There was no change in her liking for him. Mechanically she noticed the disorder of his scant hair and rumpled sleeves.
Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have a glimpse of a possible course—she might live with Dodge and perfectly express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In that way she would reestablish herself beside him and place their vision in bronze on an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and the blind.
It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected and valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of her character and experience had at least brought her this—a not inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire. The detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys released her from its common obligations. That conviction, however, was too intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her any conscious dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of justified indignation.
Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows that would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness took on a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water. Slowly the blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the sparrows in the ivy. There was the passing rumble of an early electric car on the paved aged street, the blurred hurried shuffle of a workman's clumsy shoes. The brightening morning was cool with a premonitory touch of frost; at the window she saw a vanishing silver sheen on the lawn and board fence.
A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was without a trace of the momentary frost on the grass. She was tranquil, leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her unflushed body. Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments, black and white; brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying the inevitable sash about her supple waist.
Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock—she hadn't given him a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she was genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation of her purpose. Arnaud was putting butter and salt into his egg-cup, after that he would grind the pepper from a French mill—pure spices were a precision of his—and she waited until the operation was completed.