“I don’t think I do, but I admire it a good deal.”
He was looking at the letter lying on the divan, and Brayfield was before him, tormented and dying. He had always disliked the look of Brayfield, but he had felt almost a sort of affection for him when he was dying. Foolishly perhaps, Dion wanted Mrs. Clarke to say something kind about Brayfield now.
“If you admire it, why don’t you like it?” she asked. “A person—I could understand; but a room!”
He looked at her and hesitated to acknowledge a feeling at which he knew something in her would smile; then he thought of Rosamund and of Little Cloisters and spoke out the truth.
“I think it’s an unwholesome-looking room. It looks to me as if it had been thought out and arranged by somebody with a beastly, though artistic, mind.”
“The inner room is worse,” she said.
But she did not offer to show it to him, nor did she disagree with his view. He even had the feeling that his blunt remark had pleased her.
He asked her about Constantinople. She lived there, she told him, all through the spring and autumn, and spent the hottest months on the Bosphorus.
“People are getting accustomed to my temerity,” she said. “Of course Esme Darlington is still in despair, and Lady Ermyntrude goes about spreading scandal. But it doesn’t seem to do much harm. She hasn’t any more influence over my husband. He won’t hear a word against me. Like a good dog, I suppose, he loves the hand which has beaten him.”
“You’ve got a will of iron, I believe,” said Dion.