"And help me on with my cape."
He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable determination to sit on.
She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more atrociously luminous than the last. "I must keep you up to the mark," said she, as she turned with it. "Your wife's looking at you, and I feel responsible for your good behaviour. Don't keep her waiting. Can't you see she wants to go?"
"And I want to go, too," said he savagely. And he went.
And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie's departure, Lady Cayley smiled softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.
She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her furious; she had made her go.
She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.
If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.