“Oh—pretty!” said Mrs. Elles, as much as to imply that she did not wish to stand on anything so trivial as good looks in the seër’s good opinion.
“At any rate, you enjoyed yourself?”
“Enormously! I mean, that I did not want to be a blot on your party, so I screwed myself up, and was gay!”
“You mean you were acting a part?” Egidia answered, coldly.
“Well, partly,” Mrs. Elles replied; then she added with the pretty smile that leavened so many of her little insincerities, “but I confess—I forgot every now and then, and let myself feel as if nothing had happened, and I was a girl again, beginning life—the life I always wanted, the life I was made for, I think. Oh, don’t you see how hard it all is for me, this course I have to take—that I must take for his sake?”
With a comical little twist of the mouth, she went on: “Some are born virtuous, some are—something or other—what is it?—and some have virtue thrust upon them! I know that I must defend this wretched case for the sake of other people, but I can’t help thinking that if Mortimer did win it and get his divorce, it would be the very thing for me!”
“I confess I don’t understand——”
“Mr. Rivers would marry me,” she said, wistfully, “and then I should live in London!”
Egidia laughed—she could not help it! This, then, was the net result of her carefully arranged plan for indoctrinating her guest with the pleasures of respectability and the advantages of a defined social position.
“My dear woman, forgive me!” she exclaimed. “Have you the very remotest notion of what you are saying? You cannot have the most elementary knowledge of social laws if you imagine that a man having married a divorced woman—divorced on his account—could take her out, and expect his friends to call on her! On the contrary, you and he—God help you both—would have to forego all society. You would have to live abroad in some shady place, and be thankful for the company of blacklegs and second-rate women, or else make up your minds to live entirely apart from the world. He would not mind that; he is used to it; but you! What would you do without life, movement, and, above all, consideration? That is what I was asking myself when I looked down the table to-night, and saw you happy and gay——”