"Hearing Claire do things"—that was it—and suppose he knew what she was, would he want to hear her then?
"Oh, I know," Philip was answering. "It gets to be a sort of necessity, doesn't it, when we have so many associations and memories all among ourselves? I shall find the place dreary next winter, I am afraid, when you are back among your friends, and Claire"—he paused slightly—"will be going about as ever, doing things for her husband somewhere up there in the States."
Would her husband ever imagine or discover what she was? If he did, he would leave her. She remembered a girl in the slums at home who had refused to be uplifted. "Aw, one fellow ain't enough. A plain ham is all right for some, but I want a club-sandwich." She shuddered now at the memory of the girl's words, and shrank together on her bed. Was she another of that sort, abnormal, degenerate, whose life must find its level at last in the sordid riot of promiscuity, disguising itself as love? If Claire had never touched the bed-rock of self-abasement before, she was doing it now, there in that cabin.
She heard Ortez starting to get supper, and she sat up quickly. With stern control she forced herself to seem composed and quiet, while within her passions raged like a tornado. Self-contempt, wonder, amazement, pity for her husband, for Lawrence, and hatred for Philip Ortez swept round and round in her brain like a maelstrom.
She stepped through her curtain and said gaily: "You're preempting my privilege, Philip."
He laughed. "I thought perhaps you were tired," he said.
"She ought to be," remarked Lawrence from his chair, and in her present state she imagined in his voice a tenderness, a worry for her, and a distrust of her.
She took up the kettle, and hung it on its hook in the fireplace. "I never in my life imagined myself cooking over an open fire in this way," she said as she turned toward the little storeroom adjoining.
"You like it?" Philip asked carelessly.
She felt sure that his eyes had read her heart and that he was looking toward the future, his future with the wanton mistress he had found.