Mrs. Elles demurred.
“Well, pretending to be happy and gay—though I really and truly believe you were. As you have just been saying yourself, you were in your element. And I thought what a volcano it was that you were standing on, and how, if the worst came to pass, how different a life yours would be from this you covet—and all the time you were thinking that the very fact of your divorce would entitle you to it all! Good Heavens! Instead of sitting there, gay and important, admired and attended to, with people taking the trouble to mesmerize you and analyze you and take your soul to pieces for you, you would be hidden away in some little foreign town—Boulogne, say?—cut, snubbed, and penned up for life with no other society but that of the man you have dragged down along with you, and involved in your ruin, and who would end by hating you in consequence.”
Mrs. Elles cried out, outraged. “You forget—you forget that he proposed to me—when he thought I was free!”
“I beg your pardon——” Egidia said, vaguely.
“No, don’t beg my pardon, you meant to be kind—but——” She stopped, and her whole manner altered as the humiliating suggestion took root in her mind. “Tell me—you must mean—tell me in so many words—you must mean to say that he never really cared for me? For God’s sake, speak out!”
“If you ask me to speak out honestly, then I don’t think he really did! He is not what is called a marrying man.... Now you will of course never be able to forgive me.... Let us both go to bed now at any rate—I am quite worn out!”
She turned aside wearily, and passed through the portière, letting her hand drag after her, as she went. Mrs. Elles’s vexation at her plain speaking died before a more generous instinct of gratitude to the woman who had befriended her in her need. She caught hold of the fugitive hand——
“Oh, don’t leave me like this; indeed, you are my best friend. Thank you, thank you—for telling me the truth. I ought to know it.”
“It is only my opinion!” said the other, suffering herself, however, to be drawn into the room again, by the insistent tenderness of her rival, which touched her, and made her feel a brute.
“Yes,” Mrs. Elles went on sadly. “Only your opinion, but you have known him so very much longer than I have.” She would have been equal to the mental sacrifice of adding, “and so much more intimately,” but hardly dared, lest it was taken, not as a compliment but as an impertinence. “I only saw him for a month, and even in that time I could not help loving him—adoring him.... How could anyone help it? Could you?”