“I came back last night and heard—you.”
Grace’s face turned scarlet and then a different color—a color mixed of anger, shame and defiance. She seemed about to speak several times—several ways—and at last she succeeded.
“I really don’t see how it concerns you,” she said, viciously.
“No,” said poor Horatia, “I suppose it doesn’t. Only I can’t stay here.”
Grace’s expression hardened to an ugly sneer.
“So virtuous as all that,” she said. “Do I say a word when you go to Jim Langley’s rooms? Don’t play the high and mighty lady with me.”
Grace had lost her intellectuality like a dropped cloak. She was pure, raging passion, discovered in sin and accused. But Horatia did not stop to analyze. She was stricken with horror. She couldn’t speak and Grace raged on.
“You’re like all the rest. I knew you’d be or I’d have told you. Pretend to be broadminded and yet scurry to get behind a fence of conventions if your own skirts are involved. What business is it of yours if I have a lover? If he isn’t married to me? He would marry me if he could and if I’d let him. He’s married now to one of the silly fools who runs around with your sister. He can’t stand her. He hates her presence—and he loves me and I love him. We get what we can and then you come with your face of horror to preach to me—to tell me I’m not fit to live with! Fit to live with! I’m fit as the rest of the hypocrites that you live with. Women or men—they’re all alike—covering their traces better. I wonder where your brother-in-law spends some of his nights when he has to go out of town. Do you think those silly little doll-faced prattlers can hold a man? As for you—you go as far as you dare with Langley. How do I know how far you go? I don’t spy on you when you go to his rooms on Sunday! Not fit to live with! God, this prating of righteousness—sex righteousness, the most silly lying farce in the world. There is no such thing as righteousness. But there is love and passion, little white-face.”
Still Horatia did not speak. Before this ugly situation she had become powerless to attack or to defend. She had neither weapons nor skill for such a fight. And Grace tore on, through a tirade of defense and condemnation, revealing her shattered pride and her spirit torn by the sense of guilt, of satisfactions and strangled discontents, trying to believe in its own rectitude. But poor Horatia could not analyze it then. She was only able to see facts and to hear the anger and accusations against herself. She knew instinctively that Grace did not mean them but she had said them and in the saying had irretrievably marred and stained some things in Horatia.
Stray phrases hit her ear cruelly. Grace was now condemning her—now men—now women.