By this stroke he had won, for he had made her angry ... the thing he had been seeking to do all the while.
“I hear from him twice a year ... when my lawyer sends his mother money.”
“You’d do well to forget his existence.”
And then they had talked for a time without arriving anywhere.
As usual it was Richard who had won. He had gone back to Sabine as if nothing at all had occurred.
Thérèse drank the last of her coffee and then laid her dumpy figure down on the divan in the dark library. She was tired for the first time in her life, as if she had not the strength to go on fighting. She might have but a few years longer to live and she must hurry and settle this matter. There must be an heir to whom she might pass on the fortune ... not a sickly girl like little Thérèse but a man who could manage a responsibility so enormous.
Though her body was weary, her mind was alert. There still remained a chance. In the gathering darkness, she knew that the chance depended upon two things ... the hope that Ellen Tolliver still loved Richard as she had so clearly loved him on the night years earlier when the girl had talked to her in this very room; and the hope that Lilli Barr was as honest, as respectable, as bourgeois as Ellen Tolliver had been.
She got up and in the darkness made her way to the bell. When the butler appeared and switched on the lights, she said, “Please get me a box for the concert of Lilli Barr.... It’s a week from to-morrow.” And, as he was leaving, she added, “I shall give a dinner that night. See to it that the rest of the house is got ready.”
This was the first step.