“For gratifying my idle curiosity.”
To himself he said, “How inconceivably barbarous women are to one another!” and the thought was coupled with an ignoble wonder, which had often assailed him in the earlier days of their wedded life, as to whether there was any end at all to Camilla’s forehead, or whether it had really gone to look for the back of her head? But his voice was well under control before he asked—
“And she? How did she take it?”
“How did she take it?” repeated his wife, with a sombre wrath in her tone that testified to the intensity of the annoyance that the transaction discussed had caused her. “How does she always take slaps in the face? With turned-up eyes and turned-down mouth, and a Sainte Nitouche air that would almost convince one in the teeth of one’s senses that she was the innocent lamb and one’s self the butcher.”
“Did she give any explanation—make any palliating statement?”
The question was inspired, not by the idle curiosity of which Edward had accused himself, but by the forlorn hope that, since she was presumably making a clean breast of it, Miss Ransome might have added to her confession an explanation of the still uncleared-up mystery of her meeting in the park with that other person, whose moonlit outline had worn such an ominous resemblance to Colonel Landon’s.
“Explanation! Not she; she was far too shrewd. No, her line was an appeal to the feelings. She addressed herself to the wrong quarter for that!”—with a short laugh of scorn.
Edward’s was naturally a questioning spirit, and he was still asking himself whether, after all, Miss Ransome’s guns had been so ill laid and pointed when Camilla spoke again.
“It is criminal to rejoice in one’s friends’ calamities, more especially when one has brought those calamities upon them; but, at least, we are the gainers.”
“Yes.”