But again she threw off the sweet, poignantly sweet influence and strove to think clearly.
"You had your chance, Eugene, before I was married. I would have listened to you then, the night before you sailed for Europe, but you didn't believe in me, you showed it plainly." Angry tears glittered in her eyes at the remembrance.
"Ah, how could I?" His smile was at once cynical and tender. "I knew your temperament, that craving, artistic temperament. It is much like my own. We spring from the same stock, remember. You had all the inherited love of luxury and beauty as I told you then and you were starved, starved, Dita, and in a state of revolt. Your imagination was aflame with what Hepworth offered. And I—" he threw out his hands with a disclaiming gesture, "Where was I? My feet on shifting sands, I hadn't touched bedrock then. Ah, well, what's the use? The past is past. It's the future we face. My heaven, Perdita, what a future!"
His eyes held her, drew her. Involuntarily, she swayed toward him. Then, impatiently, as if resenting her own attitude, she rose to her feet.
Dita drove home, with the faint smile still lingering about her lips, still dreaming in her eyes. She drove through the park, green still in spite of frost. A mist palely irradiated by the sunshine it obscured enveloped the landscape in a sort of opaline enchantment and unsubstantiality.
It was with a sigh of regret that she entered her own house. She felt as if she had wilfully shut the door on the wooing and pensive autumn without and gone into the bleak and wintry atmosphere of regret and puzzle and doubt.
But as she moved listlessly across the hall a servant handed her a note from her husband.
She tore it open and read it. Then she read it again. It seemed to her that the rustle of the paper was like the crackle of thorns, and the fool's laughter associated with it. She had meant to manage this situation in her own way, to keep her hand well on the lever, and behold it was all arranged for her.
Very briefly the letter informed her that Hepworth's western interests would require his personal supervision for several months. That he hoped she would endeavor to make herself as comfortable and happy as possible and arrange her time in any way that best suited her. That was all. But as she walked to her own apartments it seemed to her that the air echoed and rang with the arid and mirthless laughter of fools.