She felt cheated, stunted, revengeful because of this common fate. Steve was setting out for new worlds to conquer––he very likely would have a good time in so doing. She must continue to be fearfully rushed and terribly popular, having a good time, too. How dull everything was! Strangely, she did not give Mary Faithful or her part in Steve’s future a thought––just then. She was thinking that Ibsen merely showed the awakened Nora’s going out the door––as have Victorian matrons shown their daughters, urging them to do likewise. But it really begins to be interesting at this very point since it is not the dramatic closing of the door that is so vital, but the pitfalls and adventures on the long road that Nora and her sisters have seen fit to travel.
Beatrice was deprived of even this chance, even the falling by the wayside and admitting a new sort of defeat, or travelling the road in cold, supreme fashion and ending with selfish victory and impersonal 297 theories warranted to upset the most domestic and content of her stay-at-home sisters. But she, like all Gorgeous Girls, must be content to stand peering through the luxurious gates of her father’s house, watching Steve go down the long road, then glancing back at her lovely habitation, where no one except tradesmen really took her seriously, and where all that was expected of her, or really permitted, was to have a good time.
Steve shrugged his shoulders. He felt a great weariness concerning the situation, nonchalant scorn of what happened in the future of this woman. As for Mary Faithful––that was a different matter, but he could not think about Mary Faithful while standing in the salon of the Villa Rosa with the Gorgeous Girl as mentor.
“Suppose we do not try to talk any more just now?” he suggested. “We are neither one fit to do so. Wait until morning and then come to an agreement.” He spoke as impersonally as if a stranger asking aid interrupted his busiest time.
Beatrice recognized the tone and what it implied. “I am agreed,” she said, after a second’s hesitation. “Do not fancy my father and I will come on our knees to you.”
She swept from the room in a dignified manner. Steve waited until he heard the door of Constantine’s room bang. He knew his wife had rushed to tell her father her side of the matter––to receive the eternal heart’s ease in the form of a check so she could go and play and forget all about Stevuns the brute.
He walked unsteadily through the rooms of the lower floor, out on to the main balcony, and back again. He could not think in these rooms; he could not think 298 in any corner of the whole tinsel house. It seemed a consolation prize to those who have been forbidden to think.
He went to his own ornate and impossible room, which should have belonged to an actor desiring publicity, or some such puppet as Gay. He tried to sleep, but that too was impossible. He kept pacing back and forth and back and forth, playing the white bear as Beatrice had so often said, wondering if it would be too much the act of a cad to go to Mary Faithful and merely tell her. He could think at Mary’s house––he must have a chance to think, to realize that Beatrice refused to come with him and to tell himself that nothing should force him to remain in the Villa Rosa and be the husband of the Gorgeous Girl, set right by her father’s checks, the laughingstock of the business world that had called his hand.
The humiliation, the failure, the loss––were good to have; stimulating.
Wonderfully alive and keen, he did not know how to express the new sensation that took possession of his jaded brain. He was like a gourmand dyspeptic who has long hesitated before trying the diet of a workingman and when someone has whisked him off to a sanitarium and fed him bran and milk until he has forgotten nerves, headaches, and logginess he vows eternal thankfulness to bran and milk, and is humbly setting out to adopt the workingman’s diet instead of the old-time menus.