Yes, certainly Louie must have a wicked heart, or she would not have looked on the kneeling woman as she did. She wondered what, texts apart, Kitty could have to say to God. To pray—with her feet in a warm place! Why, Louie mortified herself more for an absent man than Kitty seemed to do before her Maker!... And even when she had stifled the thought she still had no more than a negative compassion for Kitty. She was not unsorry for her and her weakheadedness; beyond that Kitty was not, or ought not to have been, her affair. What was her affair was herself and what little remained of her youth. Kitty was hardly more than a year or two older than she, but she looked a dozen years older; Louie wondered whether her shoulder blades too would soon resemble the set-squares in Billy's studio, whether her waist also would seem a broken thing within empty looking folds....
Kitty continued to pray and to warm her feet. Louie, wondering what her next snappishness would be when she rose from her knees again, continued to watch her.
Then Kitty rose. She turned to Louie.
"By the way, did you brush that blue skirt of mine?" she said. "Oh, very well, it doesn't matter now; perhaps I oughtn't to have asked you; thank you; I can do it myself in the morning. Sorry I spoke."
Louie turned away.
These were the times when she could hardly tell what had possessed her ever to have supposed that she would be able to keep watch and ward over Kitty at all. Kitty was perfectly free to meet Miriam Levey or anybody else she had a mind to meet. And why, she asked herself at these times, should she not meet her? Where, hanging and such moonshine apart, was the risk to Jim? Indeed, it seemed to Louie that that story that seemed so to weigh on Jim was quickly becoming altogether beside the mark. The whole venue of his difficulties was rapidly shifting. What he had done had not been discovered and probably never would be discovered; what he wanted now was, not to be protected from remote and shadowy and nonsensical dangers, but to be told how he was to be happy with the wife whom he had seen fit, in the great heap of his wisdom, to keep in ignorance. Of course the remoter danger need not be entirely forgotten, but this, or else Louie was greatly mistaken, was what those scarce-heard questions on the night of that long walk had really meant.
And, in that case, what the devil was she, Louie Causton, doing in this gallery at all, with nothing of Jim but silence and absence, and nothing but peevishness and petty tyranny from Kitty? Roy, it might be, was still ready to marry her; Buck never ceased to importune, sulk and implore; Jimmy, one way or another, would be to provide for; and she knew now how little she could do for him alone. Even her desire to "show" Richenda Earle had now passed. She wanted, desperately wanted, all the things she persisted in rejecting. Why was she becoming morose, disillusioned, devil-may-care? It was a familiar question now, but as she undressed that night she asked herself again what it all meant.
She answered herself that there was no mystery about it. She supposed it happened to every woman. It meant, of course, the passing of her youth.
But, her head on her pillow, she had her compensating hour. No need to re-describe its kind; there was now added again that forced and desperate illusion, of the unity of herself, her boy, and the man she would have had his father. She knew she merely abused her fancy and must suffer for it afterwards, but no matter; if it was a drug it was a sweet one, and that it might stay with her a little longer she chose uncomfortable positions that would keep her awake. She could hear Jimmy's breathing across the dark room. Jim, Jimmy and herself——
It was against her own will that, at two o'clock in the morning, she slept.