"What difference does it make?" she asked fretfully, throwing out her hands with a weary gesture and losing her self-control. "I can always reach her, somehow. She has not done with me yet, I can tell her. Unless," she added, with a low, meaning laugh, "her friends are ready to make it well worth my while to disappear."`
"You will not find her friends unwilling to aid in that desirable result. But I have first to know your motive in annoying her so cruelly."
"Call it rivalry, call it revenge," she said, with a shrug. "Either one of these causes is strong enough. She is, if you must know, the only woman I ever feared could take my place in my late husband's life—permanently, I mean," she added, with an ugly smile.
"I take it that I am speaking to Lord Clandonald's divorced wife?"
"Really, my good sir, you give yourself, or rather Miss Winstanley, 'away,' as they say in the vernacular of your richly-gifted country. You are evidently well-informed of the progress of that immaculate young lady's affair with Clandonald—continued on shipboard doubtless from America, and who knows when and where since?"
"The young lady, whose name I forbid you to mention here," cried Glynn, with a darkened countenance, "met the gentleman in question on shipboard for the first time, as she did twenty others, and has never seen or communicated with him since."
"She has convinced you of that fact—then rumor is right for once, and there is a confiding fiancé from America? After all, yours is a younger civilization than ours, and you still believe in your girls?"
Glynn interrupted her. He had got all he wanted from Ruby Darien.
She had been a striking beauty, had, even now, a certain reckless grace of manner. Her face was as Posey had described it. He read there untruth, degradation of moral fibre, and the ravage of disease and drugs. There was no use in dealing with her in heroics. Money would buy her, and money she should have.
"If Miss Winstanley's friends agree to make it worth your while—substantially worth your while" (her eyes glittered) "to keep at a distance from her, never again to approach her in deed or speech, at the risk of forfeiting a monthly allowance of say—" (here he mentioned a sum which caused Ruby Darien's haggard face to flush high with covetous delight)—"it will certainly not be without an understanding on their part of how you contrived to present yourself through Lady Campstown's premises without identification by her servants."