“The Maitland child was working hard,” said Mrs. O’Rane.
“She’s being hunted into it by the family,” said Gaymer, breaking silence for the first time. “She doesn’t get on with her own people—small blame to her!—, and Connie Maitland doesn’t want to be stuck with her for all time; so, when a man with a certain amount of money comes along—”
“She’ll get him easily enough,” interrupted Mrs. O’Rane. “No man of thirty-five is proof against innocence and bobbed hair. They think they’re renewing their youth; and, if they’ve made fools of themselves already, they imagine a girl of eighteen will be nice and tractable... And eighteen adores the wisdom of thirty-five and loves to think that purity and youth have won the day against experience. I had a succès fou when I was eighteen; nine old men proposed to me in one week, and seven of them said that I was like a flower with the dew still on me. The only one I cared for had a wife already; he didn’t call me a flower, but he knew enough of women to be dangerous. I’m sure Eric Lane calls the Maitland child a flower; and, when she grows up, she’ll be so bored that she’ll run away with the first man who knows that women aren’t flowers....”
O’Rane retired within himself and continued his analysis. Gaymer was certainly in love; too prudent to betray himself by attacking a rival, he soothed his own troubled spirit by pretending that Ivy Maitland, if not in love with him, was at least not in love with any one else. Sonia—to judge by her voice, though no one saw her stealthily examining her reflection in the strip of glass opposite her—was just old enough to be jealous of a girl ten years younger, who was beginning to attract men by her looks and youth rather than by artifice or qualities of mind. And, if the Maitlands were indeed forcing Ivy into marriage, no compulsion was needed on the other side; though Eric had talked to every one, his voice too became animated only when he was with Ivy....
“Well, here we are,” said Mrs. O’Rane, as the car came to a standstill. “D’you like to take it on or will you come in for your drink, Johnny?”
Gaymer sat for some moments in silence, as though unable to make up his mind to do anything.
“Oh, never refuse a good offer,” he answered at length, as he dragged himself out of the car.
“Help yourself, then. I’m lunching out and I must change my dress.”
In the moment that she took to hurry into the house and glance at her letters, Gaymer watched her with a new, impersonal interest. His eyes followed her as she ran upstairs humming to herself. Less than three years before, it was commonly believed that she had quarrelled with her husband and run away with another man; tiring of him, apparently, she had come back. It was curious that women could dart to and fro like this; in his own experience he had always been the first to tire and he had never gone back to a woman after passion, drearily cooling, had at last mercifully died; if his passion for Ivy had cooled, he could not now return to her, but she had broken away while she still amused him, while his power over her was strongest, while he had only to rouse her jealousy in order to make her do whatever he wanted....
A faint fragrance of violets lingered in the hall, provocative as the broken music of Sonia’s voice when she sang to herself overhead. Though he had always found her too metallically sure of herself to be attractive, Gaymer felt resentfully that he was being denied something that other men had and that ought to be his. O’Rane was waiting for him in the library, but he was bored with the company of men. Softness of voice and touch, lightness of step, sweetness of body, yielding gentleness... A man was incomplete without woman....