“Oh, I’m not—not a bit,” she assured him. “Of course I’ve always known you’d marry some time. I perhaps might have wished—indelicacies.”
Langley was pacing up and down with embarrassment and his face showed mingled pity and anger, but she did not seem to see him.
“But you don’t love me. There was a day when you thought you did. Do you remember that day when you had tea with me—a winter afternoon and the snow was coming down outside and it was so warm in the little yellow living-room—do you remember my little yellow living-room?—and you leaned down over me at the tea-table and kissed me—because you said you couldn’t help it—just once?”
“Oh, damn it all, Rose—what’s the sense in this? That nonsense was long ago. It was so damned foolish.”
“It was nonsense,” she answered quietly, “nonsense, I suppose, to you. Just a whim to you—just as Jack’s suicide was an impulse to him—and so for whims and impulses, I’ve wasted all my life.”
He was suddenly kinder. Perhaps the appeal of that inert figure made him sorry for her just as anger on her part would have aroused every inch of him to masculine resentment. He sat down beside her.
“You mustn’t talk like that, Rose. You’re young, lovely. Of course you had a rotten deal, but you’ve everything in the world ahead of you yet and if you’re brave you’ll have it all coming to you.”
“With a woman when love is gone or has become hopeless, everything is gone.”
Subtle playing on the chords of man’s vanity! Rose Hubbell had not developed her technique for nothing. Langley’s softening and his discomfort showed in every line of his restless figure. And Rose sat up, to advantage, a little more tense.
“Jim, I want you to be happy above everything. And Horatia is wonderful and beautiful. Only don’t let her absorb you. She is so strong—so much stronger than most women or men that she tends to absorb people. I feel myself shrinking into nothing beside her. I am only warning you as an old friend and a wise woman. A woman’s greatest attraction to a man is a man’s strength and she likes to be dominated—not to dominate.”