A whole hothouse of flowers emptied into her room could not make opaque yellow fog supportable, and the sight of William Massarene driving past her windows or coming up the staircase anything less than torture.
How she envied those women of ruder ages who could hire bravoes for a quick cold steel to rid them of what they loathed. She hated him so intensely that there were even times when she looked wistfully in at the gunsmiths’ shops in Piccadilly.
But she lived in a world in which all strong passions seemed farcical, and the ridicule of the thing restrained her from buying a revolver. A tragedy with Billy as the slain! She laughed a hollow little laugh of misery and scorn as she threw herself back in her brougham and ceased to look at the little ivory mounted weapons so temptingly displayed by the gunsmiths.
She had insight enough to perceive that his adoration of her was a thing dead and gone for ever; she saw that the only dregs of it which remained with him were love of hurting her, of mortifying her, of ordering her about as though she were a factory wench in one of his cotton-mills in North Dakota. Fortunately for her his prudence saved her from any display of this tyranny in public; but in private he treated her as a tanner of the Ile de France might have treated a young duchess of the Faubourg when it only needed a sign to the mob for the axe to fall and the pikes to be twisted in the perfumed hair. She had no will of her own; she dared not dispose of her time for a week; she had to know what he permitted and what he forbade.
“She’s a morsel for a king,” he would say to himself, passing his tongue over his lips. Still he had become very indifferent to her, except that his power of humiliating her was always agreeable and stimulating to him.
“You’ve found out as Billy ain’t a fool, haven’t you, my beauty,” he said a hundred times to her. “Billy’s been one too many for you, eh?”
And at such moments if a revolver had been near her she would have shot him dead.
The harassing torment of her compulsory submission to him made her look worn, anxious, thin. “Surely I am not losing my beauty,” she thought with horror, as she looked at herself in the mirrors, and each day she was obliged to have a little more recourse to the aids of art.
She knew well enough that however brilliant may be artificial loveliness, it is never quite the same as the radiance of that natural beauty which can affront the drenching rain of a hunting-field or the scorching sun on a yacht-deck, or, most difficult to bear of all, the clear light of early day after a ball.
Oh, how she hated everyone! Cocky in his grave, and Beaumont in his shop, and Ronald who had brought all this misery upon her, and Brancepeth who had taken her at her word; and—oh, how bitterly and with what deadly hatred!—this coarse, common, hideous creature who said to her in his brutal derision: