She must wring from him—she must and would—a much fuller history of his engagement. And of those conversations in the garden, too. It stung her to recollect that, after all, he had given her no account of them. She had been sure they had not been ordinary conversations!—Mrs. Fairmile was not the person to waste her time in chit-chat.
A gust of violence swept through her. She had given Roger everything—money, ease, amusement. Where would he have been without her? And his mother, too?—tiresome, obstructive woman! For the first time that veil of the unspoken, that mist of loving illusion which preserves all human relations, broke down between Daphne and her marriage. Her thoughts dwelt, in a vulgar detail, on the money she had settled upon Roger—on his tendencies to extravagance—his happy-go-lucky self-confident ways. He would have been a pauper but for her; but now that he had her money safe, without a word to her of his previous engagement, he and Mrs. Fairmile might do as they pleased. The heat and corrosion of this idea spread through her being, and the will made no fight against it.
CHAPTER VII
"You're off to the meet?"
"I am. Look at the day!"
Chloe Fairmile, who was standing in her riding-habit at the window of the Duchess's morning-room, turned to greet her hostess.
A mild November sun shone on the garden and the woods, and Chloe's face—the more exquisite as a rule for its slight, strange withering—had caught a freshness from the morning.
The Duchess was embraced, and bore it; she herself never kissed anybody.