“I think you understand what it is I mean. I have been married only six months but I realize that one of us must die ... either Lilli Barr or Mrs. Callendar. I am trying to decide which it must be. It is hard because both of them are very much alive and neither of them is still in her first youth. That’s what makes it difficult. I don’t know whether it is worth while to kill Lilli Barr in order that Mrs. Callendar may live and (she made a wry face) be all that is to be expected of a lady in her position ... the wife of Richard Callendar. I fancy you understand what I mean.” She leaned forward and asked, “Will you have another cup?... No?”
She discussed the problem coldly, with an air of utter detachment; these two creatures—Lilli Barr and the second Mrs. Callendar—might have existed without any relation to herself. Sabine, understanding perhaps that it was only in such a fashion that she was able to discuss the affair at all, took her cue and said, “The first Mrs. Callendar is dead. She has been dying for some months, but she is dead, completely dead. And Sabine Cane is alive again, more alive than she has ever been ... and free. My God! How free!”
For a time Ellen sat thoughtfully staring into the fire and when at length she spoke, it was to say, “Ah! I know what you mean by being free. I know perfectly. I can imagine what it must have been.... I’ve seen it myself.”
And while she talked thus, calmly, with the one woman in the world who had every reason to hate her, a woman whom she had defeated but who still seemed in some outlandish fashion a friend and ally, she kept seeing the villa and the white-walled garden in Tunis. She kept seeing her husband (who had once been Sabine’s husband) walking up and down in the cool of the evening, a few feet from her chair yet as remote as if he had been on the opposite side of the white desert beyond the walls. She saw him walking and smoking and ignoring her, his strong brown hands clasped behind him, absorbed always in some mystery which had nothing to do with her, and yet conscious (he must have been conscious) of a shadowy conflict that would neither vanish nor be pinned down—a man who shut her out of his existence and yet treated her as a possession. She kept seeing the handsome face, the curved red lips, the finely arched nose, the dark mustaches and above all the cold, gray, unfathomable eyes. (If only once he had given way for a moment. If only once that inhuman aloofness had melted, not into a fierce, glowing passion, but into a touching, simple affection....)
“I know what it is,” she repeated slowly. “I wondered sometimes ... in the long evenings, how you endured it. And I wondered too whether I should ever be able to endure it. You see, the difficulty is that I have no time now to experiment. I must decide. If I gave twelve years of my life, I should be....” She thought for a second. “I should be forty-seven. I dare not risk failure at that age. That would be unbearable because there would be nothing ahead.” Again she was silent for a time and then murmured, “I wanted to talk with you. I should have come to you if we had not met here.... I could not have helped it. It was impossible to talk of him with any one who has not known him ... who has not lived with him. Such a person could not understand what he was like....”
Sabine sat on the edge of her gilt chair, hungrily, with the air of a woman whose most passionate desire was at last being satisfied. For years she had waited. Only once before—on the morning she called at the Rue Raynouard—had she even spoken of the thing. She had said on that occasion, “You know my husband ... a little. So you can guess perhaps a little of the story.” (It was a different Sabine who sat here saying, “My God! How free!”)
The cigarette had burned until it scorched her gray gloves. “But it is different with you. He is in love with you. He never loved me. It was you that he loved always. I know that.” And with a pained ironic smile, she added, “Sabine Cane dares say what Mrs. Callendar could not even think.”
Outside the house the twilight had come down gently over the trees in the little park. Beside Sabine’s tiny motor, Amedé waited, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Belowstairs Victorine regaled the servants’ hall with an embroidered description of what she had witnessed, but when pressed for details became vague and unsatisfactory.
Sabine stirred and murmured: “Besides, I don’t fancy you are entirely.... How shall I say it? I don’t wish to be offensive.... I don’t fancy perhaps that you are completely in love with him. I mean that you have not lost your head. If you gave him up, it would not be the end of everything....”
Ellen sat up very straight, her mouth almost hard. “No,” she said. “It would not be the end of everything!” And then relaxing a bit, she continued, “No. But I am in love with him. I do love him. I can’t describe it.... It’s a kind of hypnotism.”