She whirled out of the room before he could collect his startled wits. She was out of the flat and half down the stairs before he could stop her.
The vast, high house was dark. She ran down the familiar stone steps, drew the long bolts of the entrance door. As she opened it, she heard the patter of slippers, a little down at heel, covering the flights; heard a hoarse, cautious voice cry out down the black shoot of the quiet staircase.
“Pamela! Come back! Don’t be a fool! Don’t lose your head like this!”
Her only answer was another strident laugh. The door thudded after her. She stood alone in the night—a chilly night, with a spray of rain. She stood facing the black mass of the Park.
She swept on westward. After a while she grew cool, practical enough to put her hand in her pocket and feel if she had her purse. It was there, lying heavy at the bottom. Her head was on fire, her sore heart beat rapidly. She went on trying to formulate her life as the day must see it. Dawn meant shame, ridicule, curiosity. She couldn’t walk London in thin shoes with heavily jetted toes, in a cloak bordered with swansdown and a long tea-gown.
What should she do when dawn came? She tried to be cool, practical. She had always been practical; women who earn their own bread are compelled to be. She walked on very quickly. The streets were almost empty. She met with no annoyance. Yet she felt that this was the measure of her degradation—this night alone under the London stars. What should she do? She knew what she wanted to do. Go back; ignore everything. Yes, she wanted that. She kept lashing herself with fierce self-reproach. She called herself shameless, spiritless, vicious. But she couldn’t help it. She wanted to go back—to breakfast with him as usual, to say nothing. She loved him. That terrible cankering love! Would nothing destroy it?
At Sloane Street she turned down, making her way instinctively, like all hopeless, desolate creatures, to the river. She walked along and along, not noticing distance, not feeling the soreness of her lightly-shod feet, until she came to Chelsea.
She crossed the road and walked closely by the houses in Cheyne Walk. She went by Oakley Street, by Cheyne Row, by the red blocks of flats beyond, and by the Hospital, where lights still burned in certain windows. At the corner of Beaufort Street she stopped. What on earth was the good of going on?
A quick, frightened feminine cry, a hoarse curse from a man, startled her, and she stumbled to the pavement, conscious all in a moment that a hansom had nearly knocked her down. It stopped at a house with a heavy door painted white. As she stood there by the railings, unsteady, uncertain, a woman jumped from the hansom and opened the gate of that house.
She had a long cloak too. Beneath it hung a soft mass of black net which flashed with steel. Their eyes met; the eyes of these two women on the pavement. The hansom rattled off. The lights in the house, except one on the ground floor, were out. The pavements wound away, wet and empty. Their eyes met. Pamela forced a smile, put out her hand in a conventional way.