“What is the good of you?” she said, apostrophising them violently. “You are no good when it comes to the serious crises of life. Even a common old ‘Enquire Within’ would be better. I don’t know what it is I am in for—what it all means. Can Mortimer divorce me straight away? What is the formula?” She wrung her hands. “If only I could keep his name out of it?”
She unlocked the door of her room and went out upon the landing and looked down over the banisters. Mortimer was dining! “Though empires crumble,” she murmured to herself. She heard the clatter of knives and forks; through the long well-like slip between the banisters she could see the parlour-maid carrying dishes. Mortimer was dining well, and intending to divorce his wife!
She was too frightened to properly enjoy the antithesis. She went back into her own room and lay down upon the bed, shaking in every limb. She had eaten hardly anything that day.
She must have dozed a little. She woke with a start, to see a broad shaft of light coming in from the doorway, and her husband, a stout undignified sort of avenging angel, standing on the threshold. She sprang into a sitting posture.
“Make some light!” he said impatiently.
“Why bother?” she said languidly. “You can see to scold me quite well enough in the dark!”
“Scold!” he said, in an accent of contemptuous reproach, coming nearer. He was flushed, but quite sober. She wondered if he really had had the heart to dine.
He enlightened her. “You don’t seem to realize,” he said, “the position of affairs. I have been quite unable to eat any dinner.”
“What about me? But, however, that is neither here nor there. The point is”—assuming as viragoish an air as she could—“will you please tell me what you can have meant by allowing Aunt Poynder to come up here as your emissary and abuse me, your wife, and say awful things out loud for all the house to hear?”
“You are begging the question, Phœbe,” her husband said, and in his earnestness and sincerity he was almost dignified. “You must know how serious all this is! What have you to say in explanation of the charges which Aunt Poynder brings against you, and that woman’s letter to me which I showed you?”