Lady Cummerbatch was one of those lucky women who find solace in lamentation. They are the fortunate ones, whose bitterness of heart can be dissipated in bitter speech.
"I've heard," she went on, too distracted about her own plight to be conscious of the rank impertinence of which she was being guilty. "I've heard all about your husband. He's the wild Barnaby Hill who was jilted by an Irishwoman and disappeared and married abroad to vex her, and then turned up after his people thought him dead. You're an American too, though you are not my kind. They seem fond of you here; they all take your part;—but what difference does it make? Aren't we two miserable women?"
She began to weep noisily, and then to shiver. Getting into bed, she pulled her fur cloak over her shoulders, and sat hunched up, staring at the light.
"Do you mind my not putting out the candle?" she said. "I can't bear to lie worrying in the dark. If that auto hadn't stuck, and the Duchess hadn't jumped me when I got out to see what was the matter, I'd have been out of my misery.... I said to Sir Richard once—'You married me for my money,' and he laughed in my face and said—'My good young woman, you had an equivalent—you married me for my title.' And then I just screamed, 'I married you for your title! Oh, yes, I married you for your title!' till he banged himself out of the house."
"But if that was not true——" said Susan.
"True? It was all true," she sobbed. "The pity was it didn't keep true. When I married that man I couldn't have told you if his eyes were grey or green. But there—! It wears off with them and it wears on with us."
In her lamentation she continued to identify herself with her compatriot; their common misfortune, as she conceived it, was mixed up in her bewailing.
"Why don't you try it, like me?" she said. "Why don't you run away from him? If you cry and stamp and bluster it makes them vain, but when they've lost you outright they miss you.... Oh, it's awful to live with a man and watch him getting impatient because you are in his way and he's tied to you;—to see him looking hard at you, thinking how could he have paid the price! He tried to be civil at first, but his face soon taught me.... I wonder how long were you deceived?"
"I was never deceived," said Susan, hardly knowing she had uttered that sigh aloud. Her arms were round the other woman now; a poor wretch who had once been happy. Ah, with what pain would she not have gladly purchased some mirage of happiness, some illusion that she was his ... and beloved ... for half an hour!
The haggard butterfly who had been cursed with riches dropped her voice from its wailing tune to a whisper.