“Lord Ottway has dignity, if that’s what you mean,” said Louise. “I hope Gordon does marry Helen. It would be very suitable.”
“As for suitable—I don’t know,” said Madame Claire, musingly. “The girl seems a little hard—self-sufficient. Still, I don’t dislike her.”
“I only wish Judy would do as well,” Louise went on. “She’s almost certain to throw herself away on some nobody.”
“If he were a nice nobody I shouldn’t mind,” said Madame Claire.
When Louise got up to go, Madame Claire followed her into the bedroom where her fur coat was. She longed to say something to her. She felt that the words existed that might soften that bitter mood, but she could not find the right ones. She was sick at heart with anxiety. She knew that Eric’s patience was at breaking point, and that he found his wife’s sarcasm hard to bear. Louise had only lately resorted to sarcasm—that passing bell of love—and yet, underneath it all, Madame Claire felt that she loved him, and longed to be different, but that something—some strange twist in her nature—would not let her. She seemed to her like a woman pushing her frail boat farther and farther out into a dangerous current, and all the time crying weakly and piteously for help. She doubted if that cry reached any ears but hers.
“I am the only one who can help her,” she thought, and at the same time sent up a prayer to the god who understands women—if such there be.
A few days later she sent Louise a note, asking her to come and see her.
“If I can only avoid being mother-in-lawish,” she thought, “I may be able to accomplish something.”
Louise found her sitting in her high-backed chair beside a wood fire. The room was full of the scent of freesias, and she wore a few of them in the front of her gray dress.
When Louise had put aside her wraps, Madame Claire began to say what she had to say without any unnecessary preliminaries.