“Who is the girl?” asked Prosper. He was deeply flushed. Being capable of simultaneous points of view, he had been stung by that cool phrase of Betty’s concerning “Jasper’s guilt.”
“I’ll tell you in a moment. Did you destroy my letter?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, Prosper, please!”
He took it out, tore it up, and walking over to the open fire, burned the papers. He came back to his tea. “Well, Betty?”
“The girl,” said Betty, “is the star in your play, ‘The Leopardess,’ the girl that Jasper picked up two Septembers ago out West. He has written to you about her. She was a cook, if you please, a hideous creature, but Jasper saw at once what there was in her. She has made the play. You’ll have to acknowledge that yourself when you see her. She is wonderful. And, partly owing to the trouble I’ve taken with her, the girl is beautiful. One wouldn’t have thought it possible. She is not charming to me, she’s not in the least subtle. It’s odd that she should have had such an effect upon Jasper, of all men....”
Prosper sipped his tea and listened. He looked at her and was bitterly conscious that the excitement which had pleased and surprised him was dying out. That faintness again assailed his spirit. He was feeling stifled, ashamed, bored. Yes, that was it, bored. That life of service and battle-danger in France had changed him more than he had realized till now. He was more simple, more serious, more moral, in a certain sense. He was like a man who, having denied the existence of Apollyon, has come upon him face to face and has been burnt by his breath. Such a man is inevitably moral. All this long, intricate intrigue with the wife of a man who called him friend, seemed to him horribly unworthy. If Betty had been a great lover, if she had not lost courage at the eleventh hour and left him to face that terrible winter in Wyoming, then their passion might have justified itself: but now there was a staleness in their relationship. He hated the thought of the long divorce proceedings, of the decent interval, of the wedding, of the married life. He had never really wanted that. And now, in the ebb of his passion, how could he force himself to take her when he had learned to live more keenly, more completely without her! He would have to take her, to spend his days and nights with her, to travel with her. She would want to visit that gay, little forsaken house in a Wyoming cañon. With vividness he saw a girl lying prone on a black rug before a dancing fire, her hair all fallen about her face, her secret eyes lifted impatiently from the book—“You had ought to be writin’, Mr. Gael....”
“What are you smiling for, Prosper?” Betty asked sharply.
He looked up, startled and confused. “Sorry. I’ve got into beastly absent-minded habits. Is that Morena?”
Jasper opened the curtains and came in, greeting Prosper in his stately, charming fashion. “To-night,” he said, “we’ll show you a leopardess worth looking at, won’t we, Betty? But first you must tell us about your own experience. You look wonderfully fit, doesn’t he, Betty? And changed. They say the life out there stamps a man, and they’re right. It’s taken some of that winged-demon look out of your face, Prosper, put some soul into it.”