Evie would never forgive her that discovery.
With all the elasticity gone out of her, she resumed the work she had left half-an-hour before.
But as she lay in bed that night in her little flat, Louie ate her heart out again. She hated Evie Jeffries. She had remembered, too, an old, old slander—the slander to know the truth about which Kitty Windus had come to the Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. Was it that that had brought Mrs. Jeffries to the Consolidation now?
Louie tossed and tossed. Oh, she cried vindictively, if it only had been so.... But to have to submit to the indignity of Evie's jealousy and not to be able to give her grounds for it! And Mrs. Jeffries wanted to see her flat! Well, she should be welcome. Louie would hardly be at the trouble to lie about things, but every stick of furniture in this place in which Jim had never set foot might silently lie for her if they would! Would that be to drag Jim in? Well, let him be dragged in; a woman with a husband like Jim, to be jealous! Why, with Louie ready and glad to lose her soul for him, he was the very egotist of faithfulness! He could not be virtuous without damning Louie with his grave and candid looks! She could almost have laughed at him. When all was said, such virtue was a byword, and the story of Joseph a thing for a quiet smile! Then Louie's laugh became a cry aloud, that woke Jimmy. Jimmy went to sleep again, but she was no calmer.
Bitter as spurge was that old story of hers now, and bitterer still the only moral lesson it now appeared to her to have. Oh, no doubt there was a deal to say for their conventional morality, but a pretty moral lesson it was, after all, that you repented of a history with one man only when it forbade a second history with another! And she swore again that that first history should not have stood in her way; more, far more than that was his own headstrong virtue, and perhaps that was not all either. She had been born for him, she knew it; he had had never a secret from her save those large open secrets that scarce a woman shared with a man yet; his hands, that could take life for love, were made to hold her. She knew it in her soul.... But huge as it was, he didn't see it. He allowed a pretty face to blind him to it all. "Oh, come, come!" she had called to him on the only night, of all those nights, when he and she had walked together; and his answer had been to take himself away. When she had kissed his shoulder she had merely kissed the spot where another woman's head had lain.
Oh, if that slander could only have been true!
She looked at, and almost tossed aside unread, a letter that came for her in the morning. Not for a single moment had she slept, and she wanted no letter from Roy—for it was from Roy. Still she might as well read it. She did so.
Billy Izzard was with him; it had come out that Billy knew her, and he wanted to see her. "I've come back for you," the letter said, "and I'm not going to let you go this time. Do write when I can come and see you. Off out now, but do write." She threw it into the fire. Marry Roy? She would far rather commit another sin than such a reparation. The trouble was that she could not commit the sin.
That morning she was sent for by Jim. As she turned the handle of his door she was ready to make a bet with herself about what he wanted her for. She was not mistaken. He wanted to thank her for showing his wife round the day before.
His wife—always and for ever his wife.