“What is holding you now—your wife? She would soon get over it. She’s only a girl, she hasn’t had enough experience to hold a man. Besides, she must know by now that you only married her for money; she must know you don’t care for her; women always find out.”
The bald, incontestable statement of his reason for marrying Lettice disconcerted him. He had never made the acknowledgment of putting it into words to himself, and no one else had openly guessed, had dared....
Suddenly it appeared to him in the light of a possible act of cowardice—Lettice, a girl, blinded by affection. And, equally, it was undeniably true that he did not care for her ... he did not care for her? that realization too carried a slight sting. But neither did he care for Meta Beggs; something different attracted him to the latter; she—she brought him out, that was it; she ministered to his pleasure, his desire, his—
“Don’t,” she said firmly.
His balked feelings overmastered him, and he disregarded her prohibition. She slipped from his grasp as lithely as the serpentine pearls had run through his fingers.
“Haven’t you learned,” she demanded, standing, “that I can’t be bought with silk stockings or a little necklace? Or, perhaps, you are cheap, and I have been entirely wrong.... I’m going to get something to eat, with the people who brought me from Greenstream. I will be back here in two hours, but it will be for the last time. You must decide one way or the other while I am gone. You may stay or leave; I’m going to leave. Remember—no more penny kisses, no more meetings like this; it must be all or nothing. Some man will take me to Paris, have me.” She dissolved against the dark of the maple grove.
XVII
But, curiously, sitting alone, he gave little consideration to the decision, immediate and irrevocable, which confronted him. His thoughts evaded, defied, him, retreated into night-like obscurity, returned burdened with trivial and unexpected details of memory. It grew colder, the rich monotone of mountain and sky changed to an impenetrable, ugly density above which the constellations wheeled without color. His back was toward the maple grove; the removed, disembodied voices mingled in a sound not more intelligible than the chorus of frogs. It occurred to him suddenly that, perhaps, in a week, a month, he might not be in Greenstream, nor in the mountains, but with the white body of Meta Beggs in the midst of one of those vast, fabulous cities the lust of which possessed her so utterly.... Or she would be gone.