“I think it would.”
“You take Viola’s side then?”
“And when did I ever do anything else? I’m off.”
He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a faint contempt.
“How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he’s fool enough to hint at the truth of his true self,” he thought. “And Carey—who’s so clever about people!”
CHAPTER III
WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below, interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed. Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs. Wolfstein’s curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the mirror changed and looked almost old.
This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then. It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin, unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.
She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her thick, waving hair.