"You said that to me once before—in Paris."
"Said what? Oh, the quotation! When?"
"At your place, after the Variétés."
"What a memory! Yes, you're certainly resolved to try to make me vain. But I'm adamant. Did you know that? I'm made of stone. Do you treasure up what every woman says to you? The answer is a wounded gaze; it's dark to see expressions, but I'll take it for granted."
"I remember what you said to me half an hour ago, and I know your bitterness is a sham. You were meant to be——"
"Oh, 'meant'!" she cried recklessly; "a woman's what she's made. I'm afraid I've been made untidy. Do you mind driving in a hansom with such a figure?"
She plucked at her veil in the strip of looking-glass, and bent her face to him for criticism. The brilliance of the eyes that she widened glowed into him as she leant so, and his arms trembled to enfold her. His mouth was dry as he muttered a response.
The sweetness of June was in the air that caressed them as they sped through the moonlight. With every sentence she let fall, with every glance she shot at him, she dizzied him more, and he sat strained with the struggle to retain his self-command. Through his febrile emotions, the horror of proving false to Cynthia loomed like an angel betokening the revulsion of his remorse. He could imagine the afterwards—he knew how he would feel—and there were instants in which he prayed for the drive to finish and permit escape. But there were instants also in which he ceased to fight, and steeped in the present, yearned only to forget his wife, though tardy remembrance should be a double scourge.
Her fingers were busy at a knot of violets in her dress; and she held the flowers up to him, looking round, smiling.
"Shall I give you a buttonhole?" she inquired gaily. "It would be an appropriate conclusion—my ideals, my withered hopes, and my dead violets! Oh, I shiver to think of what I said to you! Did I gush towards the last? I've a fearful, a ghastly misgiving that I gushed. If you acknowledge that I did, I'll never forgive you; but you shouldn't have encouraged me. Stoop for the souvenir! It cost a penny—symbolic of the sentiment.... Though lost to sight, to memory dear! It will be a very dear memory, won't it? Use me one day! I shall come in as material—the hard woman of the world, who bares her soul on impulse, and the Star and Garter terrace, to the man she likes and stands revealed as—as what? I wonder what you'd make of me. Child, I shall never get this buttonhole in if you don't turn! I've admitted I'm a spectacle, but you might suffer for a second."