"How long you have been! What a deuce of a time you women do take to put your gowns on," grumbles her husband, as he meets her at the bottom of the stairs. "The horses have been standing out there in the cold for more than half an hour."
Lauraine makes a sign to her maid to put on her wraps, and then follows her husband out to the carriage. He has not looked at her—he has not noticed one detail of the exquisite toilette—his voice in addressing her is harsh and impatient, and they have been married but two years. Yet the coldness and indifference she now receives is ten thousand times preferable, she thinks, to the frantic passion that he had once bestowed. He had been mad to have her, and he had won her! Now—well, now that infatuation looked as absurd as it had once been imperative. It is a man's nature; it always has been and always will be so.
Lauraine too feels strangely changed. She seems to have grown cold, hard, indifferent to everything. These two years seem like ten. This is her first season in London since she married, and she looks upon it as a duty enforced, and with not one throb of pleasure or anticipation. She is young, rich, and very lovely; but she carries a heavy heart within that beautiful bosom, and knows that the one great error of her life is ever demanding compensation.
Six months ago she and Keith Athelstone met again. He had gone back to New York after her marriage, to settle his affairs, and for eighteen months she had neither seen nor heard anything of him. When they met in Rome she had been startled and afraid of the change wrought in so brief a time. He looked years older. The bright, genial, sunny temper that had given him so great a charm was now sullen, uncertain, and bitter. He was restless, extravagant, and capricious. Much that she had heard of him pained and annoyed her deeply; but she scarcely dared remonstrate for fear of being met with a sneer or a reproach. Her husband took an unaccountable fancy to the young fellow, and had him constantly at their house; but it frightened Lauraine to see the hatred and contempt that at times flashed out in Keith's eyes and voice against the man who called him friend. No word of the past—no allusion to that wedding-morning of hers—ever passed between the young man and herself. She almost hoped he had forgotten his boyish passion—would be content to accept the friendship she had once proffered him, and he had rejected so scornfully.
For herself nothing seemed to signify much now. The whole tenderness of her nature spent itself on her child.
If she could have had her way, she would have liked to live in the quiet old Northumbrian house which was her husband's, and there given herself exclusively up to the care and teaching of her boy. But such a wild idea, was of course, scouted and ridiculed.
Her husband was proud of her in a way—proud of the sparkling beauty, the dainty grace, the mind and manners of the woman he had made his wife. She would never be fast or vulgar, or think only of conquests and admiration, and drag his name through the mire of scandal. No; she would always be safe—that he felt, and if he had grown tired of her he was determined that the world should see and admire her, and applaud his choice. It would gratify his vanity, just as it had done in Rome, where she had been courted and worshipped and eulogized everywhere as "Lady Lauraine."
The carriage rolls smoothly and swiftly on. Lauraine leans back, with her eyes gazing dreamily out at the lighted streets. Her husband breaks the silence at last.
"I want you to be specially civil to Lady Jean," he says abruptly. "You were very stand-offish when she called on you the other day. She's the most popular woman in London, and the prettiest. You two ought to be friends."
"I don't like her," answers Lauraine coldly.