Her fit of weeping exhausted itself by its own violence, and as she glanced at her face in the glass she was horrified to see her red and swollen eyelids and her complexion smudged and dulled like a pastel which some ignorant servant has dusted.
“Nothing on earth is worth the loss of one’s beauty,” she said to herself, and she went upstairs and, without summoning her maid, washed her face with rosewater and ran a comb through her hair; the Blenheims sitting on either side of her, critical of processes with which they were familiar.
As she sat before her toilet-table and its oval silver-framed swinging mirror, her eyes fell by chance on a glove box made of tortoise shell and gold, with two gold amorini playing with a fawn on its lid.
“Billy!” she said suddenly, half aloud.
William Massarene had given her the box when she had betted gloves with him at the previous year’s Goodwood races.
“Billy!” she said again under her breath.
Yes, there was Billy; the only person in the whole world who could do for her what she wanted without feeling it.
She would have to tell him, to make him understand the urgency of it, some portion of the truth; the blood rushed over her face with the repulsion of pride. Tell her necessities to the man she bullied and despised! She sat with her eyes fixed on the two gold cupids thinking how she could put the story so that she would not be lowered in his eyes. It was a difficult and embarrassing test of her ingenuity, for not only had she to get the money out of him but she must get him to send or to go to Paris by that evening’s train. She had pillaged Massarene without shame or compunction. She had made him “bleed” without stint. She had made him do a thousand follies, costly to himself but useful to her, like the purchases of Blair Airon and Vale Royal. She had rooked him without mercy, considering that she did him an honor in noticing him at all. But, by some contradiction, or some instinct of pride or of decency, she shrank at the idea of actually borrowing money from him—of actually being indebted to him for a great service.
In all lesser transactions with him she had considered him her debtor for her patronage; but to make him do this, to make him pay Beaumont and restore her the Indian stone, would be to become his debtor. There was no shirking the fact. Would she ever be able to bully and insult him afterwards? Yes, why not? He was a cad, a snob, a horror; such men were only made to be trodden on and have their ears boxed.
She decided that it did not matter what a low-bred brute like him knew or thought, and that since Providence had given her a rich idiot into her hands it would be worse than folly not to use his resources. Anything, anything, was better than to let the imitation jewel go to Hunt and Roskell for inevitable detection. And there were now only forty-three hours in which to act.