WHEN Mrs. Evremond found herself actually in her carriage it seemed to her that it would never go fast enough, although Heaven knows she was indifferent to the speed of her vehicles as a rule, there being no reason why she should hasten—no place she especially cared to arrive at, no excitement or element of it in her quiet life. But this afternoon she was conscious of every rotation of the wheels.
When the Arc de Triomphe had been passed and in and out among automobiles and tramways her little yellow-wheeled brougham crossed the Etoile and began the descent, suddenly, with the inconsequence marking a woman’s emotions as clearly as it stamps her reasonings, Mrs. Evremond decided the coachman was driving at a ridiculous rate. After all, she hoped never to reach the Place de la Concorde—never to traverse the Pont Royal and leave for the Latin Quarter and the other side of the river—the insouciant world of the Bois and American Paris. She had no desire to find the obscure street in which her husband had his studio—which street was, however, the direction she had given her footman, and it was toward No. 15 bis, Passage du Maine, that with such useless speed she was being driven.
They reached and passed the Elysée Palace Hotel. Mrs. Evremond blew through the tube at her side, the brougham drew up to the curb, stopped and she got out.
“You may go home. I shall not need you again to-day,” she directed, and, turning to the avenue, she began to walk down the Champs Elysées. She might at least be mistress of her own gait; walk with short, feverish little steps or retard her pace to keep harmony with her alternate rapid or halting reflections, for her mind, as she walked, went back over the past six months of her married life with a persistence, a clearness, that denoted how important were the details, how ineffaceable were the marks her experiences had made upon her, how intensely she felt what she had lived, how seriously she had taken life, how absorbed she was in the man to whom she had attached herself—how desperately she loved her husband. The vividness with which she thought of him had the precision of a fresh image. The impulsive rush of herself toward the harbor her conception of him made proved, by its very force and freshness, that thinking of him like this was a new thing. She had lived with him, existed by his side, for six years, and had never thought about him, around him, as she did to-day.
She gasped. “Perhaps if I had thought about him a little more and loved him a little less, this might not have happened!”
The happening, so distressing to her, which had caused her, at an unusual hour, to ring for her carriage, dress and fly from the house on an expedition she knew to be close to ill-breeding in its likeness to melodrama and its distinct opposition to codes of expedient, had been finding a letter—the world-worn story that comes to each woman with a new pang.
As Mrs. Evremond reached the Rond Point, she asked herself: “What am I really going to do? What do I expect to see and find, and how shall I act when I find it?”
Women constantly commit the platitude—if such an expression can be used—of thinking they are acting on certain occasions contrary to their characters, out of gear with their codes. Mrs. Evremond was not an impulsive temperament. Unaccustomed to crises or events that called for the quick decision of more brilliant and self-sufficient minds, she had found herself face to face with a problem, and was acting with a precipitation that made her dizzy, and a promptitude that suggested she had been brought into contact with just such difficulties many times before.
The well-bred gentlewoman had seized, without second thought, the letter lying open at her feet, read it, gasped over it, paled over it, hated and disbelieved it—crushed it in her hand, and, with the now crumpled sheet between glove and palm, she was on her way to verify its purport; to make sure of the fact which women, if they would but know it, are many times happier in ignoring; to prove to herself what? That her husband was unfaithful to her; that she must either “cease to love him”—by the operation of one of those unbalancing coups de foudre which, we are told, turn honey to gall and love to hate in the human breast at one revolution—or that with the discovery she must also acknowledge, no matter what he did, she would love him still, and would, therefore, curse an enlightenment which should only give her a useless bitter grief to suffer for the rest of her life.
She stopped still at the Place de la Concorde. She never walked alone in the streets of Paris at this hour, and the aspect of the city was new to her. In the early winter twilight the Place shone through the mingled mists of evening, and the golden hazy scintillations haloing the yellow lamps. The sunset had left the sky over the Tuileries still red, and above the river the heavens darkened and grew cold, but the bridge lights beckoned. Her hands were in her muff, her cheeks red with exercise, and her eyes, which had wept more tears in the last few hours than they would acknowledge to have seen for many months, stung in the sharp air. She stood irresolute. Behind her the Champs Elysées stretched to the apex at the Arc. It would be a quiet, restful walk home. Should she not take it, return and force herself to learn the lesson—that it is folly to be too wise? As she clasped her hands together in her muff the letter crushed upon her palm; she set her lips, drew a sharp breath, and resumed her walk, turning across to the Pont de la Concorde, traversing it quickly, a graceful, agile pedestrian among the many foot passengers, unobserving of the admiring eyes of those whose chase is beauty.