“We’ll do what?” I asked, coming back to her. For once I felt rebellious, and showed it, whereat she smiled.
“Supper after the theater at Cherry’s.”
“Oh, well, I don’t mind that,” I volunteered.
“With ‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp,” she added.
The searchlight dawned upon me. It swung around the room once or twice, and that was enough. I knew in the flood of sudden illumination that the girl had planned this thing in advance, with the daring of despair—and a wife’s despair, a very young wife’s despair, is a more desperate thing than the anger of any other woman. Natica had planned it all in advance; had figured it, and the chances of it. And in the balance she had confidently thrown the asset of my assisting her.
The right sort of a man, I suppose, would have become enraged because of her taking things for granted. But I—I had been chained to her chariot too long a time to experience the mild sensation of resentment.
Natica wished to face her husband in a crowded restaurant after the play. More than that, she wished to face him in company with a man not of her sort, even as he—Drayton—was escorting a woman whose lane of living did not rightly cross his. The coincidence of Natica’s means-to-an-end being the Hartopp’s husband, was simply a gift of fate; an opportunity of administering poetic justice, which could not be denied. Had the Hartopp not possessed a convenient husband, Natica would have arranged for another companion. But even she had not dared to plan her coup alone, with her chosen instrument of wifely retaliation. Through it all, she had confidently counted on me, a discreet background, a pliant puppet.
She could not know what Drayton might do, after they had eyed one another from different tables. She did not much care. But she would at least have the painful joy of the Brahmin woman’s hope, who trusts by some fresh incantation to secure a blessing, formerly vouchsafed her by the gods, but which now old-time petitions fail to renew. It seemed cold-blooded, the entire arrangement, and yet I knew it was not. She was far braver than I could have been, even to win her caring. But I understood.
I must have been rough as I took her hand. “Look here,” I said. “It’s a desperate game, Natica. You wouldn’t have dared to say that to any other man than me. You’ve got used to seeing me fag for you. And I’m going to do it this time, too. But if you weaken, by Heaven, you’ll deserve to lose for good. It’s crazy, it’s the act of a pair of paretics, but I’m going to see it through.”
She was crying when I left her. “Percy, my dear,” she said; then she began to laugh—that after dinner benedictine laugh of hers. “If there weren’t Jack, that speech of yours just now might make me want to kiss you.”