When her women came she began her toilette for the dinner at the Duchesse d'Uzès'. It was long, and nothing contented her.
From that dinner she went to various other houses; she returned to her own house late; she heard that Othmar had come back from Ferrières and gone to his own apartments. The following day they would be obliged to go to Amyôt. The great party there could by no possibility be postponed; royal people were bidden to it. If such a gathering were broken up at the last moment, for any less cause than death or illness, the whole world would know that there was subject for separation and dissension between her husband and herself. She would have given ten years of her life to prevent the world ever knowing that.
For the first time in her life, as her woman unrobed her and took off her jewels, she was conscious that she had been unwise in the management of fate. She had been desirous that the world should see that her influence could even withstand and outlast all those adversaries of time and custom and disillusion which saw stealthily at the roots of every human happiness and sympathy; yet she had been so careless and so indifferent, that she had allowed the very changes which she wished the world never to see, to creep in upon her unawares.
It had never occurred to her that she had been as inconsistent as one who wishing to preserve untouched a fragile vase of crystal, should set it and leave it in a crowded street for anyone to use or break who chose. She had not cared to keep her crystal vase herself, and yet she was enraged that it was broken.
CHAPTER LII.
Damaris went out blindly, down the staircase and across the vestibule and halls into the open air.
She had no knowledge of what she did; the serving-men looked at her and then at each other, and laughed, and whispered some coarse things, but no one attempted to arrest her steps; on the contrary, they put her right when she mistook her way in the corridor, and almost shoved her into the street, where the light of day was fading.
She was strongly made in body and in mind, and in all the tumult of her thoughts, the sickness of her shame, she did not grow faint, or forget her road, or fall upon the stones, over which her feet were dragged so wearily.
She found the streets which led to the station of the West, and sat down in the waiting-chamber, and heard the roar of Paris go on round her like the roaring of wild beasts calling for food: that those beasts had not devoured her was due to him; she did not reproach him or forget her debt to him, only she wished that he had let her die that night upon the bridge.