“It, it was—”
“Who were they for, Gordon?”
A blundering panic swept over him; Lettice was more strange than familiar; she was unnatural; her hair didn’t shine in the sunlight streaming into the shallow, green basin; in the midst of the warm efflorescence she seemed remote, chill.
“For her,” he moved his head toward Meta Beggs.
She withdrew her burning gaze from Gordon Makimmon and turned to the school-teacher.
“For Miss Beggs,” she repeated, “why ... why, that’s bad, Gordon. You’re married to me; I’m your wife. Miss Beggs oughtn’t ... she isn’t anything to you.”
Meta Beggs stood motionless, silent, her red cotton dress drawing and wrinkling over her rounded shoulders and hips. The necklace hung gracefully about the slender column of her throat.
The two women standing in the foreground of Gordon Makimmon’s vision, of his existence, summed up all the eternal contrast, the struggle, in the feminine heart. And they summed up the duplicity, the weakness, the sensual and egotistical desires, the power and vanity and vain-longing, of men.
Meta Beggs was the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed voluptuousness relaxed in the scented spray of pagan baths; the woman with piled and white-powdered hair in a gold shift of Louis XIV; the prostitute with a pinched waist and great flowered sleeves of the Maison Doree. She was as old as the first vice, as the first lust budding like a black blossom in the morbidity of men successful, satiated.
She was old, but Lettice was older.