The drinking that Ted had done had not improved his keenness of wit. He laughed.
“I think you could almost make me do that,” he answered, “but what’s the use of marrying? What we want is love—you know. I sized you up at the start. Freda—you wonderful girl—let me tell you—”
What he told her, the outlines of his plan, struck Freda with impersonal clearness. She had an odd sense of watching the scene from the outside, as an observer who jeered at her a little for being implicated. Similar scenes she had read about ran through her mind. She thought of Ann Veronica and Mr. Ramage. “He hasn’t gone quite far enough for me to actually fight him,” she thought—and then—“I ought to ring for a servant or something—that’s what’s always done. I’m being insulted. I ought to either faint or beat him. I’m interested. Isn’t it shocking!”
Above all these almost subconscious thoughts her mind dealt with practicalities. She wondered where the others were. She must get out of the house early in the morning. She wondered if Ted would keep this up even if the others came in.
She tried to get to the door but her movement towards escape roused him further. It had evidently never entered his head that she really meant to rebuff him. He caught her in his arms.
“So you see, beautiful, how easy the whole thing will be—”
He was growing noisy and she realized that she did not want the servants to hear. After all it wasn’t her house. She saw that they had been alone for an hour. It was past two. And then to her immense relief she heard the limousine outside.
“The others are here,” she said to him.
“Damn the others,” he said mumblingly, and, without apology, forced himself into his overcoat. In the hall he seemed to recover himself. Perhaps his sense of social convention struggled and overcame his amorousness temporarily. He went out, past the entering girls, vaguely speaking rather at them than to them.
Nothing of what happened after that seemed quite real to Freda. She was fairly worn out from her trying day and hour of struggle and embarrassment. As she stood for a minute by a long window trying to collect her thoughts, she heard the girls at the door and it flashed through her mind to ease the disgust from her own mind by telling the whole business. She knew how frankly these girls talked of such things among themselves.