Inside the air was almost stiflingly hot with that heat which one expects to find only in forcing-houses, and the violent perfume of heady flowers added to the illusion and positively took one by the throat. Laurence did not believe in the modest fragrance of violets and roses; to please her blossoms must be tropically sensational in scent and color, erratic of shape if possible, and especially very costly; wherefore the vases all over the suite bristled with a newly hybridized lily, red and yellow in gaudy streaks like a South-American parrot, and pouring forth from their pointed petals torrents of pungent muskiness.
Half sitting, half reclining on the piled-up cushions of her favorite pink velvet lounge, enveloped like a bon-bon-à-surprise in folds upon folds of flesh-tinted gauze forming the most amiable of princely sauts-de-lit, she awaited her husband in apparent calm, although her heart was beating uncomfortably. She knew she was in for a scene of some kind or other, and had prepared for it by repeating to herself over and over again: “I must stand firm; I must stand firm at any cost! Men are afraid of scenes, even when they bring them about themselves.” But she had not expected to find Basil quite so cool and indifferent upon his return to her after several weeks, nor so unimpressed by the skilful mise-en-scène she had prepared; and when he omitted even the formal hand-kiss of greeting and merely bowed before her, she felt a sudden sinking of her throbbing heart, as if it were going down into her rose-lined slippers—pretty little slippers, which, with the accompanying silken ankles, were, as usual, effectively in evidence.
“You are not very effusive?” she faltered, her head slightly on one side, her lovely eyes radiating electric currents. “After all those days!” It was a favorite formula of speech with her, evidently, for she was certainly not thinking just now of Neville or of the Hôtel de Plenhöel.
Basil, one elbow on the chimneypiece, gazed down at her, totally unmoved. Perchance he, too, had prepared himself carefully for this interview.
“You might never have seen me again,” she continued, raising herself a little and pouting up at him like a mischievous child who wants caresses. “For it was a miracle that I was saved!”
Again she threw him a little appealing glance full of pathos, but his face was set and hard as flint, and suddenly Régis’s words flashed through her mind: “If ever Basil learns that you have stepped down from the pedestal upon which he placed you, he will be unmerciful.”
“Why don’t you speak?” she exclaimed, nervously sitting up and letting her feet drop to the carpet.
And then Basil laughed, a short, incisive laugh that cut like the lash of a whip. There are some laughs far more expressive than even the most forceful words, and this was one of that sort.
“Let me impress upon you the advisability of implicit truthfulness on your part, Laurence, before we go any further with this,” he said, coldly.
“Are you going to be ugly to me!” she exclaimed, joining her hands together protestingly, “and just because I was afraid of your murderous peasants? Are you going to be horrid, Basil dear ... to poor little me?”