Whatever there had been between them, and I never knew very clearly what, they had failed to reckon on the recrudescence of the interest I had always had for my husband, and the tie of association. At any rate Miss Rathbone failed. I must suppose that she loved Tommy, that she was hungering for the sight of him, needing desperately to feel again the pressure of whatever bond had been between them. She came into the store on the fourth evening after my husband's admission of it, on one of the excuses she could so easily make out of her father's being there. I was sitting upstairs with some sewing when she came and neither saw nor heard her, but the unslumbering instinct, before I was half aware of it, had drawn me to the head of the stair.
As I came down it, still in the shadow of the upper landing, I saw her leaning across the counter with that factious air of modishness which was so large a part of her stock in trade with Higgleston. She had on all her newest things, and I think she was rouged a little. Even with the width of the counter between them she had the effect of enveloping my husband with that manner of hers as with a net; to set up in him the illusion of all that I was in fact; mystery, passion, the air of the great world. I was pierced through with the realization that with men it is not so much being that counts, as seeming. There was a touch of the fatuous in the way Tommy submitted to the implication of her attitude as she took a flower from her breast and pinned it in his coat. The foot of the stair came almost to the end of the counter where they stood, and a trick of the light falling from the hanging lamp threw the upper half of it in shadow. I stood just within it with my hand upon the rail. Something in the avidity of yielding in my husband's manner was like a call in me; I moved involuntarily a step downward.
They heard and then they saw me; they stopped frozen in their places and the thing that froze them was the consciousness of guilt. They stood confessed of a disloyalty. I turned full in their sight and walked back up the stair. It was very late that night when Tommy came up to me.
"If that is going on in the house," I notified him, "you can't expect me to stay."
"I dare say you'd be glad of a chance to leave."
"Is that why you are offering it to me?"
It was by such degrees we covered the distance between our situation and the open question of divorce. But there were lapses of tenderness and turning back upon the trail.
"I don't want anybody but you, Olivia," Tommy would protest. "If you would only stay with me!"
"Oh, Tommy, if you would only come away with me!"
If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming caused my husband some embarrassment, and, manlike, he made her pay for it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an unconquerable passion. In any case she had imagination enough to see that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis, she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour—some criticism which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an occasional scraping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. Nobody in Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of romance.