“Won’t you come with us, Mrs. Wilbur?” Erard paused to ask.
“Thank you, no. I find enough to interest me here,” she managed to reply.
Erard shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “You should have calculated the cost of all this beforehand. No use to get into a temper about it now.” He tiptoed after his patrons.
She thought that she had calculated all the costs, and although the actual experience was more brutal than the imagined, she tried to think that she cared little for the snub itself. But she had meant to be discreet, and now she knew that in ten days Chicago gossips would have a pointed corroboration of their surmises.
She would like to go up to this good Mr. Mills and say, “I am not this Erard’s mistress; indeed I am not low enough for that!”
Then she smiled at herself, and stilled her tumultuous feelings, pretending to examine a greenish-red Renoir that was propped against the wall. One doesn’t cut a straight path to freedom, she reflected, without paying for it.
Secretly she longed to sneak out of the place before they returned. It caused her such a thumping at the heart to go through with even this ordeal, trifling as it was. But how could she face Erard, if she confessed to a consciousness of all the implications? Yet when she heard Mr. Mills’s honest voice,—“Well, Marthy, seven thousand dollars is a good deal to pay for that red and yellow haystack,”—and Mrs. Mills’s doubtful tones, “But Mr. Erard considers it a paying investment,”—then Miss Mills’s higher notes: “Oh, pa, you mustn’t look at it that way; Monet is making a great stir now; Mrs. Stevans has three of his. We must have at least one, and some Pissarros, and a lovely red Renoir,”—Mrs. Wilbur fled into a little side cabinet, pressing herself closely into the recess made by the portières. She could see the women dart questioning glances about the empty room, as if expecting to find their victim again. Presently they crossed the gallery and disappeared, Erard following them and caressing each temperament with the suitable argument. After all, she might as well have fled before as to sneak into a corner this way. Erard would think she had given in, and might drive off with the Mills.
When she had given them time enough to get away she walked towards the entrance and met Erard, who was evidently returning for her. He had divined her ruse, and that was worse than all.
“I thought you knew the Mills?” he remarked coolly, as they turned into the crowded boulevards. Mrs. Wilbur hated him violently for one moment. If there were only one phrase which would express contempt, disgust, despair—everything!
“I have met them,” she forced herself to answer indifferently.