He had wrenched himself free of her embrace and sprung out of bed. Barbara fell forward with her face on the pillow. He listened for the silence to be broken: though she had never raised her voice above a whisper, it had vibrated with passion until he fancied that it must ring and echo through the house. He opened the door, took a step forward into the warm darkness of the passage and listened. When he came back, the room seemed to be filled with the keen scent of carnations. He saw Barbara slowly raising her head and brushing back the hair which had fallen over her face; she looked distractedly round the room through half-closed eyes and threw out her arms to him; then she saw the open door, and her arms dropped to her sides.
“This is a funny way for it to end,” she murmured. Eric said nothing. “I used to believe you, too. I thought you cared for me....”
His silence daunted her, and she walked out of the room with a sigh and a half shrug.
Eric locked the door and began filling a pipe. Then he turned on all the lights and explored bedroom and bathroom on hands and knees. On the middle of the floor he found a crumpled handkerchief, scented with carnation; he fingered it irresolutely, then struck a match and tossed it flaming into the grate. Imagination or reality still scented the room with carnation, and he threw open the curtains, resting his arms on the stone sill of the window and leaning out into a starless night. A heavy dew was rising, and the stone was sticky with moisture. The scent of carnations changed to a scent of stocks; then the reek of his own pipe drowned both. He was wakeful but calm, surprised at his own calmness before and now.
He wondered what Barbara was doing....
He wondered what she would do at their next meeting. Presumably she would invent a letter from George in the morning, calling her to Ireland, or recalling her to London, but they would meet later. A man, after such a misfire, would surely go abroad for a year or two; woman seemed to lie about these things to others—(“Eric Lane was staying with the Pentyres. You know he used to be rather in love with me? I’m afraid he still is, though I should have thought that, when I married, he’d have faced facts... I wish he’d find some nice girl... Connie Maitland’s little niece was there, but she’s hardly out of the nursery...”)—until they could lie about them to themselves; in a few years Barbara would convince herself that he had broken down the locked door of her bedroom and entreated her to run away with him. Women could make themselves believe anything, when they had to save their faces, to ignore a rebuff and keep up their value in the sex-market. And, as a matter of fact, a man did not always retire to decent obscurity; he sometimes came, like John Gaymer, officer and gentleman, and stayed in the same house as the girl whom he had seduced and deserted. Seemliness of conduct, seemliness of feeling were dead....
Sleep was impossible; and he remembered with gratitude how Lady Pentyre had arranged for him to work undisturbed. She had made a literary picture of a preoccupied, irregular genius who wrote under the attack of fitful inspiration; breakfast would come when he rang for it: he was not expected, he was almost forbidden, to shew himself before luncheon; and, if he wanted to work during the night, there awaited him a touching equipment of electric stove, spirit-lamp, cocoa, biscuits, and cold chicken. Eric went into the dressing-room and surveyed with a smile her solicitous array of stationery; there was paper big and small, plain and ruled, there were pencils and pens, india-rubber, paper-fasteners and a chromatic riot of ink and sealing-wax. He unlocked his despatch-box and glanced at a bundle of manuscript; a character called Beatrice seemed to be speaking, but he read the name as Barbara; and the lines that he had given her were overlaid as in a palimpsest by the words that Barbara had spoken, was still speaking....
He wondered what she was doing....
Work was out of the question until he had thought a little more about Barbara. However far she fell, there was always a lower depth. He imagined that she had reached her own limits in marrying George, but she was prepared to be faithless even to him, she was already faithless in spirit. Barbara was too young and ardent of soul to exist without loving and being loved; it was a question of time before she joined the furtive, unsatisfied band of women who lived in more or less open infidelity; she would go from one to another, encouraging George to do the same so that he would have less cause for reproaching her.
And three years earlier she had seemed to walk clothed in a white flame of purity. Was it another pose, like her extravagant talk of devotion, gratitude, honour, sacrifice? Her romantic emotions and phrases were culled from Italian operas and sentimental novels; and she treated them seriously. He told her once that she lived in “the hall of a thousand mirrors”, donning and discarding the dress and properties of a character, watching her reflection, posturing, mouthing her lines—until the personality of Barbara Neave lost outline and became a lay figure for the clothes of others. Her own form and stature did not satisfy her; she must be Isolde, Sarah Curran, Mrs. Blessington, Joan of Arc, Lady Hamilton and, at a pinch, Messalina; which part she played hardly mattered to her... She was without a sense of right and wrong... A sensationalist, as Jim Loring called her while she was playing with Jack, before she began to play with him... or George... An emotion-hunter....