When Victorine, having exhausted all the possibilities of delay by poking and fussing over the tea tray, was forced by decency to quit the room, Sabine rose and said, “I know the habits of Victorine. She is at this minute standing outside the door.”
To prove it she walked quickly to the door and, flinging it open, saw Victorine sidle away with a pompous air of having many duties upon her mind.
“She has listened like that before ... many times. It is her curiosity and one can’t blame her for that. If I had been born a servant I should have spent all my time at keyholes. All the same she should have been sent away long ago. One has only to shoo her off whenever there is anything important in the air.”
It was her way of opening a discussion for which she hungered with a violence that made the curiosity of Victorine pale in comparison. But Ellen said nothing. She poured the tea and continued to talk of politics and the spring. It was not easy for her, who had never confided in any one. She sat behind the tea tray in the amazing, baroque room conscious that she was in the midst of a fantastic situation, yet unable to take one step in the direction she desired. She looked tall and handsome and dignified, but a little sad and weary. It was the sadness which conveyed to Sabine what was in the air.
“And Richard,” she asked abruptly. “How is he?”
“I have left him,” Ellen replied slowly, “for a time, at any rate.”
She spoke with her eyes cast down, as if it shamed her to confess that she had not made of the marriage a complete success. She pretended to be busily engaged with the flame beneath the silver teakettle. “I do not know whether I shall go back. I am thinking it out ... trying to decide.”
Sabine, too wise to interrupt, lighted a cigarette, threw back her fur coat and waited.
“I have to decide, you see, between two things.... Between myself and him, you might say. Or better perhaps, whether I shall exist only in relation to him.” She looked up suddenly, with an air of assurance which must have fascinated Sabine, who sat thinking of Ellen as she had been in the days of Murray Hill. “It is not only my music ... my career. He hates that and he hates it because, in spite of anything he can do, I shall always be known to the world as Lilli Barr and not as Mrs. Callendar. I think he forgot to take that into consideration. He is very confident, very sure of himself.”
Sabine still smiled faintly.