"I think I had better go and dine at the club. We are hardly fit to be together."
"Go, for heaven's sake!" she said, with a disdainful gesture.
Outside the door he paused a moment, head bent, hands clenched. Then a wild, passionate look overspread his young face. "It is her evening," he said to himself. "Letty turns me out. I will go."
Meanwhile Letty stood where he had left her till she had heard the street-door close. The typical, significant sound knelled to her heart. She began to walk tempestuously up and down, crying with excitement.
Time passed on. The August evening closed in; and in this deserted London nobody came to see her. She dined alone, and afterwards spent what seemed to her interminable hours pacing the drawing-room and meditating. At last there was a pause in the rush of selfish or jealous feeling which had been pulsing through her for weeks past, dictating all her actions, fevering all her thoughts. And there is nothing so desolate as such a pause, to such a nature. For it means reflection; it means putting one's life away from one, and looking at it as a whole. And to the Lettys of this world there is no process more abhorrent—none they will spend more energy in escaping.
It was inexplicable, intolerable that she should be so unhappy. What was it that tortured her so—hatred of Marcella Maxwell, or pain that she had lost her husband? But she had never imagined herself in love with him when she married him. He had never obtained from her before a tenth part of the thought she had bestowed upon him during the past six weeks. During all the time that she had been flirting with Cathedine, and recklessly placing herself in his power by the favours she asked of him, she saw now, with a kind of amazement, that she had been thinking constantly of George, determined to impress him with her social success, to force him to admire her and think much of her.
Cathedine? Had he any real attraction for her? Why, she was afraid of him, she knew him to be coarse and brutal, even while she played with him and sent him on her errands. When she compared him with George—even George as she had just seen him in this last odious scene—she felt the tears of anger and despair rising.
But to be forced to dismiss him at George's word, to submit in this matter of the invitations, to let herself be trampled on, while George gave all his homage, all his best mind, to Lady Maxwell—something scorching flew through her veins as she thought of it. Never! never! She would find, she had already thought of, a startling way of avenging herself.
Late at night George came home. She had locked her door, and he turned into his dressing-room. When the house was quiet again, she pressed her face into the pillows, and wept till she was amazed at her own pain, and must needs turn her rage upon herself.
* * * * *