“I won’t be long.” She went to the door and then turned. “I’m being taken out to dinner by my own brother,” she said softly. “You make me feel quite—respectable, Eric.”
Her last words hurt him. If there had been any one with him he would have said as she left the room:
“Good God! The pity of it!”
It wasn’t age he meant. He cared as little for that as most intelligent men. Connie had lost her youth. That was to be expected. But she had never gained its far more interesting successor, character. It was that he missed. She was spiritually, mentally and morally down at the heel. Her face was a weary mask, her yellow hair had known the uses of peroxide as well as of adversity, and her blue eyes, paler than her brother’s, looked out, without expression, from a rim of carelessly darkened lashes. The frank vulgarity of her scarlet lips revolted him.
“All that,” he said to himself, “to win a—Chiozzi!” He had hurried her off to get her hat because he couldn’t bear to talk to her in that room of childish memories. It brought back to him too clearly the girl of fifteen, with her exquisite, sparkling face, her laughter, and that mane of fine golden hair that people in the streets too often turned to stare at.… He meant to help her, he had come to help her—but how to go about it? That he must leave to the inspiration of the moment.
When she returned, handsomely furred and too youthfully hatted, he gave her another kindly kiss to encourage her—for he could see that she was really moved—and took her arm as they went to the door. An old woman in another salon across the hall had observed their movements with the keenest interest. She carried an ear trumpet, but thanked Heaven that her eyes were as good as ever. Good enough to distinguish the paint on that woman’s cheeks—which had not prevented Mr. Gregory from kissing her. Lady Gregory’s only son! She knew he had married the youngest daughter of old Admiral Broughton, a great friend of the late King’s. He had once been heard to say to him at a garden party—it must have been in 1907—There, they are getting into a cab together. He has taken her hand—off they go! Dear, dear! How very distressing! Poor Lady Gregory, and poor neglected wife! It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. And she hadn’t lived in this wicked old world for sixty-nine years—even though most of them had been spent in Kensington—without knowing a demi-mondaine when she saw one. Odd she was to see Miss Thomkinson, a cousin of the Broughtons, the very next day. No, shocked as she was at the presence of such a woman in that house, she preferred not to speak to Madame le Blanc about it. It didn’t go to enter into arguments with these French people, and besides, her vocabulary wasn’t equal to it.
In the cab, Eric said gently:
“Well, Connie, my dear, I’ve come to help you in any way that I can, and to take you back to England with me if you wish to go. I gather that your marriage is anything but happy. Tell me about it.”
Connie tried to speak but her efforts ended in a sudden burst of tears. She sobbed openly and unbecomingly. Eric, his eyes full of pain and concern, held her hand and looked out of the window at the once familiar streets. She had lived on her emotions for so long that self-control, he supposed, was utterly beyond her now. It was true that she had cried whenever she had felt inclined, during the whole of her unhappy, stormy life. But she usually cried for a purpose. This was different. Something, probably the amazing matter-of-factness of her brother, had touched the springs of her self-pity. At one step he had spanned all that had happened in the last twenty years. He was so entirely unchanged, while she—his eyes were as clear as ever, his fitness obvious at a glance, and his face scarcely lined. He represented all that she had lost, all that was sane and clean and wholesome. He reminded her of childish cricket, and nursery teas, and days on the river, and May Week, and clean young men in flannels. She had not met a man of his type since she had left her husband. She loved the faint scent of lavender that lingered in the fresh folds of the handkerchief he presently offered her. She wondered if it would be possible for her to go back with him, into the well-ordered life that he and his kind led, away from the shoddy women who had been her companions for years and the men who were rotten to the core.
“It has been a shock to you,” Eric said. “I should have warned you.”