And if she knew seasons when memories twinged like an old wound slow to mend beneath its scar, she found a certain casuistry to console regrets and compound with conscience, holding herself spiritually, as in material circumstances, a free agent, free to listen to any man, if she would, and if she would to love him. The phantom fiction of a legal bond, all that was left of her married life, she could do away at will, at little cost in inconvenience....
That morning, as every morning now, she woke with a smile responsive to the smiling promise of the day; and when she had lazily girded on her armour against fault-finding eyes, called for her car and sallied forth to while away yet another day of idleness.
Her rooms were so situate, at the end of one wing of the hotel and on the lower floor, that to reach the main entrance she had to pass the corner-room now occupied by Nelly Marquis; and malicious luck would have it that the two should meet.
The Marquis girl had been out and was returning with a small packet gripped in a shabbily gloved hand. A well-made woman with a graceful carriage, her face held elements of beauty of a wild, sweet sort, but dimmed and wasted by despondency and impaired health. Today the dark rings under her eyes were deeper, the eyes themselves more desperate than when their look had first appealed to Lucinda's sympathies. And seeing her so, Lucinda with a solicitous cry—"Why, Miss Marquis!"—paused and extended an impulsive hand.
The girl swerved away from the hand, shrinking to the wall, her scant natural colour ebbing till the rouge was livid on cheeks and lips, while her eyes grew hard and hot.
"Well!" she said sullenly—"what do you want?"
Confounded by this proof of a hostility as pertinacious as it was perverse, Lucinda faltered: "But—you are ill——"
"Well: and if I am, what's that to you?" The words uttered in a level tone nevertheless seemed to force explosively past the tremulous, waxen lips. "Oh, don't worry your head about me; think about yourself. Don't forget you can be contaminated by a creature like me, don't forget"—she accomplished a singularly true reproduction of Summerlad's tone—"I'm 'really not the sort you can afford to get mixed up with'!"
"I'm so sorry you heard, Miss Marquis. Of course neither of us had any idea you were——"
"Eavesdropping! why don't you say it? I'm not ashamed."