Lettice was more ancient than men walking cunning and erect, than the lithe life of sun-heated tangles, than the vital principle of flowering plants fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects and airs.
Standing in the flooding blue flame of day they opposed to each other the forces fatally locked in the body of humanity. Lettice, with her unborn child, her youth haggard with apprehension and pain, the prefigurement of the agony of birth, gazed, dumb and bitter in her sacrifice, at the graceful, cold figure that, as irrevocably as herself, denied all that Lettice affirmed, desired all that she feared and hated.
“Why, that’s bad, Gordon,” she reiterated, “I’m your wife. And Miss Beggs is bad, I’m certain of that.” A spasm of suffering crossed her face like a cloud.
“You ought not to have come, Lettice. Lettice, you ought not to have come,” he told her. His dull voice reflected the lassitude that had fallen upon him, the sudden death of all emotion, the swift extinguishing of his interest in the world about him; it reflected, in his indifference to desire, an indifference to Meta Beggs.
“Do you love her, Gordon?” his wife asked.
“No, I don’t,” he answered, perceptibly impatient at the question.
“Do you like her better than you like me?”
The palpable answer to her query, that he thought of himself more than either, evaded him. “I don’t like her better than I like you,” he repeated baldly.
Lettice turned to the other woman. “There’s not much you can say,” she declared, “caught like this trying to steal somebody’s husband. And you set over a school of children!”
“I don’t choose to be,” Meta Beggs retorted. “I hate it, but I had to live. If you hadn’t had all that money to keep you soft, yes, and get you a husband, you would have had to fight and do, too. You might have been teaching a roomful of little sneaks, and sick to death of it before ever you began ... or you might be on the street—better girls have than you.”