“Will you take a cigar now, Lawrence?”
“Yes!”
Loramer thrust his cigar-case into his hand, wheeled round and marched into the waiting-room, holding the valise with a strong grasp, and putting his head a little on one side.
That affair was a part of the long, slow process of Enfield’s alienation from Cora, but only one of many steps. He was tenacious and slow to change, and she held him by cords of memory and dependence as well as affection. But by degrees he came to see clearly that he had been wilfully blind, that he had always known but would not regard that she was not at all the girl he had enshrined. The end was but a trifle—the proverbial last straw. And though he laughed when she took him to task and felt a barbarous enjoyment in their reversed relations, and in her show of something like consternation, he more than once afterward felt the yearning of the converted heathen toward his broken gods.
Loramer and Enfield spent a week together on Cape Cod the same summer and took refuge from a storm in one of the huts provided for ship-wrecked people. Listening to the deafening roar of the wind and the surf, they spoke of Cora Brainard. Loramer congratulated Lawrence upon his freedom. And he went on:
“I don’t know what there is in the little minx. All the old ladies in Elmtree think her a kind of saint, but she didn’t strike me in that light. She came near making a —— fool of me, but I can’t remember anything she said, only how she laughed and her eyes sparkled.”
“I can’t laugh at her,” Enfield answered. “She hasn’t made herself and she hasn’t had a good time. She doesn’t know anything and doesn’t care for anything. She has a wonderful tact, an eye for color, and an instinct for the current fashion in what goes for literature and art. But she has no appreciation of anything permanent and no lasting enjoyment of anything. I think that is terrible. I can’t think of anything much more pitiable.”
Enfield lounged against the wall; Loramer watched him awhile, listening to the storm booming without, as he lay stretched on the straw. Then he went on:
“Do you think she’s a good girl, Lawrence? It wouldn’t be quite safe for her to run on with some fellows as she did with me.”