Mrs. Conifer was sometimes dull, so dull that she used to go to a cake shop and have her afternoon tea and listen to the other women’s chatter. Here was an opportunity that Kinsman could not miss. Before long she went to his rooms instead of going to the cake shop. It was really much more amusing. The Inn is quiet in the afternoons. A great many of the fellows are in the City, and the laundresses have gone away for the day. Mrs. Conifer used to thread her way through quiet by-ways—down Guilford Street, along monastic Great James Street, across Theobalds Road, and onwards. The gardens were quiet in those days; we did not allow children in until evening. It was so beautifully fresh and still after the roar and dust of outside London, the summer smells of provision shops, and the rattle of omnibuses. Kinsman had shaded windows—it was summer time at first—and a dainty tea. He liked her to come in the afternoons because Sophia Dominy, of whom he was a little afraid, was safely shut away in the big mantle shop where she was dummy. But by and by Mrs. Conifer came in the evenings also—after dinner, when Conifer had shut himself up for the evening in his study. She used to drive up to the gates on wet nights. I saw her more than once myself—always beautifully dressed and closely veiled, and having that intangible air of shrinking which is natural to the woman who never goes out alone after dark.
And then one night she met Sophia Dominy in the doorway. It was bound to happen. Sophia was a handsome girl with a fine figure—I told you she was dummy at a mantle shop. She came out of the shadow of the doorway as Mrs. Conifer drew into it. It so happened that Kinsman was late home that night; his windows were dark. Mrs. Conifer looked. With her quick woman’s eye she took in every detail of this other woman, whose clothes were a pitiful struggle for costly effect—seal plush instead of sealskin, weedy ostrich plumes in her hat, and in her small ears the glitter of red glass. There must have been insolent contempt in her china-blue eyes, for Sophia’s great black ones began to blaze, and she put her hand on the other’s slim, nervous shoulder. She said, with an offensive touch of comradeship:
“Good-evening, Mrs. Conifer.”
How did she find out? How do women learn these things? You can say perhaps—I give it up. I only know that Kinsman had been very careful—as careful as a man knows how.
Little blond Mrs. Conifer started, and then stared coldly at the gaudy, tawdry, dark creature in the doorway.
“I—I don’t understand,” she faltered; “I—excuse me—I do not know you.”
She made a weak attempt at dignity, but she looked horribly ashamed and alarmed. She was afraid that the girl knew everything and was going to blackmail her.
“But I know you,” returned the other, with a little fierce chuckle of triumph. “I know why you have come here to-night. You ladies give yourself such airs—you are not a bit better than girls like me. If everybody had their rights, I ought to be Mrs. Kinsman. See!”
Mrs. Conifer did see. The whole hideous position was perfectly clear to her, without another word. You won’t believe me, of course, but she wasn’t a wicked woman. She had simply drifted, like any other idle young woman might. There had been a fascination about Kinsman, with his queerly furnished rooms, his romantic airs of art-worship, sympathy, and so on. She had regarded herself as misunderstood and was inclined to be plaintively melancholy about Conifer’s obtuseness. Kinsman had been an affinity. She got the insidious flavor of the Inn. There had been nothing vulgar or wicked about the affair. It had only been delicious, piquant, dangerous—like a leaf torn out of the “Decameron.” Sophia Dominy brought everything up to date, brought terrifying visions of the Divorce Court. Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, in every thought, directly she looked into those blazing black eyes and understood.
She whisked round and rustled swiftly in her skirts of silk across the square, getting out at the Holborn end and plunging into the stream of people on the pavement flowing westward. So soon as the first tightness was out of her throat and the first desperate trembling had left her limbs she hailed a hansom, telling the man to stop at the corner of Russell Square. She fell back quivering on the seat and shut her eyes, but opened them again directly because the face of Sophia rose before her—triumphant, grinning, pale with chalk, and hidden to the thick brows with a coarse fuzz of hair.