"Jack tried to warn me something about you before I came. He seemed to think you needed me."
And suddenly Jeanette's calm broke. She flung herself face down among the silken cushions of the couch. Sylvia came and knelt beside her putting both arms around her. In a moment Jeanette sat up, flushed but tearless. Sylvia slipped back upon the floor, her hands clasped around her knees, her eyes pitiful.
"I do need you. I need somebody. Sylvia, listen to me. It is a dreadful thing for a girl to marry if she isn't in love. Fate is sure to strike back at her sooner or later. That is what happened to me. I married Francis because I thought he could give me the things I wanted--the things I thought I wanted. And he has, but it isn't what I really wanted at all. I am just beginning to understand what I do want--what life might mean, if one deserved to have it mean anything. I hate this house and the servants and the hideous kind of existence we live--the kind I elected to live. It wasn't Francis' choice. It was mine. But I hate it all now. I'd like to leave it this minute. But I can't. I'm bound, hand and foot, by conventions and fears and selfishness. I couldn't live now without luxury, I've had it so long. I couldn't stand poverty or shame or sacrifice or honesty of any kind. I'm a sham. I love Charlton. But I shan't try to get a divorce and I shan't run off with him because I'm not big enough. I'm just big enough to squirm and suffer and hate myself for being such a pitiful little coward. I'm not even big enough to send him away. I'm not worth his wrecking his life and ideals for, but I don't tell him that. I tell him I love him and that is enough to keep him here like a lap dog. Pah! He isn't very big either or he would make me go with him or leave me outright."
"But, Jeanette, it is all such a tangle. If you really care, why don't you go to Francis and tell him the truth? Surely nothing can be so bad as going on like this."
"You don't know what you are talking about, Sylvia. I'd die before I would go to Francis and I'd die if he found out, but I'm going on risking everything until something happens. I don't know what."
And in the face of such reasoning or non-reasoning, Sylvia had no answer to make. She was beginning to hate the city heartily. It seemed to be weaving nothing but misery for everybody. Was there any happiness in it? Surely she herself had found none. She desired more than anything else in the world to run away from it all, to get back to Felicia and, yes, to Jack. They two seemed the only refuge in a heaving sea of trouble.
CHAPTER XVI
AS MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPECTED
It seemed as if Sylvia's cup of disenchantment were destined to brim over before the city was done with her. She tried to view Jeanette's affair with the portrait painter with an open mind and tolerant attitude. She saw that there was no real evil in it as yet--probably never would be for Jeanette was likely to "play safe" having much at stake. But somehow it all disheartened the younger girl. She thought she could have forgiven both the transgressors more easily if they had dared a little more, or cared a little more for each other and less for themselves. If they had eloped she would have been shocked and troubled but she would have understood their conduct. It was the amazing bad taste and effrontery of carrying on so half-hearted a liaison in Francis Latham's own house and under his very eyes which was to Sylvia the least excusable phase of the matter. Deceit of any sort was obnoxious to her straightforward soul. She herself could never have kept on living a daily lie such as Jeanette was living. Something would have snapped. And somehow Sylvia found herself seeing things all around her blacker, no doubt, than they were, because of her too much recently acquired knowledge, and often she remembered the explorer's terse verdict that these people were "punk." It was all very disillusioning and made one sick at heart.
But Sylvia had other cause to feel that happiness was eluding her these days in early January. The wound to her pride that Phil Lorrimer had dealt, though seared over, was by no means healed. She tried to be perfectly fair and sane, to admit that if Jeanette's supposition were correct, Barb would doubtless make Phil a better wife than she herself would have done, to acknowledge that it was entirely natural and appropriate that Phil and Barb should have learned to care for each other during the intimate months past when she herself had deliberately neglected Phil. Even so, Phil need not have looked at her as he had that night on Jeanette's doorstep. He needn't have let her all but propose to him. That was the deepest rankling thorn of all. She had almost offered herself to him on Jeanette's threshold. If he had really cared as his eyes had said wouldn't he have understood what she was trying to tell him that the money was nothing at all, that it didn't matter in the least, that there was, indeed, nothing to be afraid of, as she had twice taken the pains to reassure him?