“I like,” she said one day, in explanation of her gospel, “to be a very respectable woman; an icily virtuous one—but yet to give the impression of being dangerous.”
Pamela had left off laughing at her oddities—she had left off laughing at anything. She was cultivating the prim, half-formed manner of a spinster well over thirty. She grew fussy over trifles, became morbidly afraid of taking cold, studied her health, her diet. She gratuitously spied over the servants, seeing an embryo burglar in every tradesman’s boy, running her fingers along ledges for dust, measuring the contents of the dishes with suspicious eyes.
“I want to be of some use,” she said, in extenuation. “I’ve had great experience in housekeeping.”
“Housekeeping!” Her hostess shrugged. “A calling artfully created by hopelessly lazy women as a blind. My dear girl, no busy woman keeps house; it’s a terrible confession of idleness. Suppose Cook does give away the dripping—why should I waste nervous energy in attempting to stop her? The dripping isn’t worth it. If they refuse to burn small cinders in the kitchen range—what matters? Figure out for yourself—I can’t—the cost of a ton of coal, and see how much Tim loses in the year. He pays—and it can’t be more than a box of cigars.”
Pamela said nothing. She retired to her room and her newspapers. She looked up from the lines of advertisements, and out at the gliding river. She thought of Folly Corner, of Jethro, in all his picturesque environment. And then she dragged herself back to thoughts of Edred; it was becoming an effort to remember him. She thought she would set aside half-an-hour every day for remembrance—as if he were some tenderly-loved dead person. She became afraid of herself. She was hopelessly fickle, of light behaviour. She was incapable of any lasting regard. She loved him. She loved him. But the words had become parrot-like—they no longer tore her heart to say them. She was forgetting him—the very thing she had once struggled in vain to do. She was becoming indifferent: the attitude she had once prayed and struggled for. And yet she wasn’t happy.
Tim precipitated things. He send his wife a telegram, saying that he was on his way home. Would she care to join him in Paris for a week?
“It needn’t make any difference to you, dear,” the excited little woman said, as her cab stood at the open door, and her wraps were carried down the path by a lilac-gowned maid, whose streaming cap-ends whirled about on the rude November wind.
She kissed Pamela remorsefully, conscious that she had been malicious now and then.
“It’s difficult for two women to live together without fighting, isn’t it?” she said ingenuously. “I wonder how they manage in a nunnery! A novel from the inside of a nunnery would cause a sensation. I’ll commend it to Tim. He’s quite clever enough to pass as a nun—but it wouldn’t satisfy my unquenchable sense of propriety. I’ve been very horrid to you now and then; but when Tim comes—we shall only stay in Paris ten days at the outside—he will keep us in order. Of course, his coming won’t make any difference,” she added, with obviously forced hospitality.
“I shall get a situation,” Pamela said, in the inert way which had become habitual. “Good-by”—they kissed again. “I’ll look after the maids. You’ll never be able to keep that between-girl. She’s hopeless.”