He shook her hand off his sleeve, and passed out into the road, without even looking at her.
Jane Anne looked at her hand—the hand he had disdained—as if she would like to cut it off. Her heavy brows contracted—met together in a dull frown of rage and disappointment.
“Then I’ll just swear anything they like!” she muttered to herself.
CHAPTER X
Mrs. Elles, on arriving at Newcastle, took a fly and drove straight up to her own door.
This detail was significant of the course she had undertaken to pursue, and the attitude she meant to assume with regard to her own life—what was left of it.
She was only thirty, she had presumably as many years again to live, and she had no intention of committing suicide. On the contrary, she meant to go through the process known as picking up the pieces.
Her policy of life was optimism—pessimism was her pose. But her unconscious tendency was to look forward—very much forward. The past she ignored, the present she disdained, the future she brooded over. It had always been so with her, even in the old days before this cyclone of emotion had swept over her, and the trivial round of things pleasant and unpleasant had been all her care and preoccupation. It would be so again.
She had the peculiar shrewdness of the feather-brained, the perspicacity of the trivial-minded; and the practical basis of her nature, which had been overlaid and smothered for a time by her spasmodic access of passion for the artist, began to re-assert itself. As the train passed easily through stations and scenes familiar, the domestic campaign of the immediate future took form and shape in her mind.
All that was now possible! She arranged it hopelessly, drearily, but as satisfactorily as might be under the gods’ dispensation. The door of Paradise was closed to her, she would make purgatory endurable. She had known the poetry of life, now for its prose. But dramatic and artistic fitness demanded that there should be no loose ends, no rough edges, no interfusing and overlapping of incompatible and discordant periods of existence. Her month of soul-fruition was to be a thing apart, a memory, complete, perfect, enshrined in her heart for ever and kept entirely clear of entanglement with the squalid phase of life that she was going to take up again. She was a reluctant but resolved Eurydice returning to the grey neutralities of the Hades from which Orpheus had so nearly rescued her.