“Well, I hope you at least will be happy, Eric, some time. When you are, you’ll become magnanimous again. Then perhaps you’ll forgive me.”
“I can’t feel that my forgiveness plays much part in your happiness.”
“I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever known what happiness means... Good-bye, Eric.”
She held out her hand and stood looking at him with eyelids flickering as though he had struck her in the face; she was wincing before a second blow. To act was so much second nature to her that her attitude of unfriended humility might be a pose; but Eric felt that, inasmuch as she had not descended to his duel of bitterness, she had prevailed in the encounter. He hated the whole evening, with its need to lie in her defence and his own bursting desire to escape the charge of magnanimity.
Eric drew his hand away, but he could not help looking at her flickering lids and reproachful eyes. So she had stood a score of times when she had goaded him to madness and his taut nerves had snapped. No longer acting, but suddenly hurt, suddenly shocked, suddenly tired; sorry to have maddened him, but helplessly torn and unable to let him go; and always gently maternal, yearning to comfort, to forgive... Her lips were parted; Eric could have sworn that her hands twitched as though she were once more going to throw her arms round him and seal her forgiveness with a kiss. With theatrical timeliness he heard George Oakleigh excusing himself from accepting an invitation....
It was impossible to stop looking at her... Why George? He wanted to fling the question at her, demanding why she had married George Oakleigh instead of waiting, though he knew that their love was paralysed before they parted. Waiting would have done no good. But why George, if he had not made her happy? She did not hint that she had married the wrong man, but it was written in her eyes; tragedy had come home to a woman who had played mock-tragic parts all her life... Loneliness... Despair... And Eric had fancied that the suffering had been all on his side, that she had at worst been worried to know how to explain away her treatment of him....
“Thursday, yes. I don’t think we’re doing anything on Thursday. I’ll ask Babs.”
George was still juggling with his invitation: he must have kept it aloft for hours by now... And he was coming to draw Barbara into the game.
“Good-bye, Lady Barbara,” said Eric.
She winced again: