"No wonder my uncle blasphemes if that represents his only idea of the relation of the sexes."
He sighed involuntarily.
"Yes, but, thank God, there is more in it all than merely that," he said. Then he repeated:—"It is a mercy Virginia did not come. It would not have suited her from any point of view. She'd have been hideously bored, and she would have been offended and a good deal shocked. It is queer the way the Puritanic element survives over there, notwithstanding their modernity."
Laurence smiled to himself, becoming aware of the slight inconsistency of his own attitude—his late heated championship of the claims of the Eternal Feminine, his self-congratulation at the fact that his own particular investment in the matter of womanhood was, at present, safely away on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then, taken by a sudden impulse—born in part of a desire of escape from the suffocating atmosphere around him—he pulled the edge of the heavy curtain outwards, passed round it, letting it drop into place behind him. He stood a moment in a contracted, blind space. The place seemed possessed of singular influences. Again he grew faint as he groped for the door handle; while a conviction grew upon him that he had stood just here, and so groped an innumerable number of times already, and that he should so stand and grope—either in fact or in imagination, just as long, indeed, as consciousness remained to him—an innumerable number of times again.
At last the handle was found and yielded. Breathing rather quickly, Laurence entered the lofty, fair-coloured room. It too was bright with electric light, but the air of it was sensibly purer than that of the corridor; while, standing before the painted satin-wood escritoire, at the further side of the fireplace, was a slender woman. Her back was towards him. She wore a high-waisted, clinging, rose-pink, silken gown. Her dark hair was gathered up in soft, yet elaborate, bows and curls high on her small head, after the fashion prevalent in the early years of the century. A cape of transparent muslin and lace veiled her bare shoulders.
VI
The young man's astonishment was immense. Recovering from the first shock of it, he was taken with reprehensible irreverence towards the sick man upstairs.
"The old sinner, how he has lied!" he said to himself. "A pretty ass he has made of me with this card up his iniquitous, old sleeve all the while!"