“Beauty and the beast, capital!” Then he seized her by the wrists and looked her up and down, as if she were something offered for sale of which he was trying to appraise the value. “You little fool, you’re young and pretty now, but in a few years you won’t be so proud. All right. There are others in the market besides you, and they do pretend, at any rate, to be glad to see me. But mind, she that will not when she may. Well, I’m off. Ta-ta!”
She did not move until she heard the outer door shut behind him. He had frightened her, and what was worse had driven home to her the fact that she was for sale. For sale to any man who chose to buy—unless West should rescue her.
CHAPTER XXI
In the early days of their acquaintanceship Mrs. Harding had felt very favorably disposed toward Marian, but gradually appreciation had given place to envy, and liking had been displaced by dislike. She understood that Marian was her superior not only in beauty, which she would have forgiven, but in education and social standing, which deeply galled her. She realized how badly she compared with Marian in conversation and the amenities of life. At first she laughed, shrugged her sturdy shoulders, consoling herself with the thought that after all men do not fall in love with a tongue; but gradually, as she realized that pretty speech is an excellent support to a pretty face, she began to hate Marian’s dainty ways and facile talk. More than once, too, Marian had shown by some little gesture or some uncontrolled look that Mrs. Harding’s coarse coarseness annoyed and jarred upon her. The latter’s treachery also filled her with the spite that so often comes to a mean spirit, who has wronged another. It was not the first time that Davis had called on her to spy upon a woman with whom she was upon terms of familiarity, but in other cases the victims had always been those to whom she had not made any pretense of real friendship and whose confidence she had not sought. But Marian had trusted her, and the betrayal of this trust, combined with jealousy, drove her for refuge from compunction to hatred and malice.
A further point was this. Some of the practices to which Mrs. Harding was addicted were obviously distasteful to Marian; it was a temptation to her, therefore, to reduce Marian to her own level, and to this temptation she now yielded. The episode with Geraldstein pleased her, as a step in the direction to which she desired to drive Marian.
One of the practices which was at present abhorrent to Marian was over-indulgence in drink. Once she had been spending the evening at a rather noisy restaurant with Mrs. Harding; they had met there two young fellows, of that age when women and wine are temptations all the more deadly because the yielding to them is held in reprobation by those from whose authority they have but recently been released. Marian was utterly bored by the pointless and often indecent jests, and watched with disgust the quantity of wine which her friend drank and its influence upon her.
Mrs. Harding saw that she was being watched.
“Don’t mind her,” she said to the youth who sat beside Marian, pestering her with his plain-spoken attentions. “She’s young and is afraid of being jolly. Some night she’ll get a bottle of fizzy inside her, and’ll be all over the place before she knows where she is. Once bitten, never shy again. Drink up, Marian, it won’t hurt you. Let’s have another bottle, boys.”
Marian left the party, her departure not meeting with any real protest, and the next morning received a visit from Mrs. Harding, whose skin was unwholesome to look at and her eyes blowzed and bloodshot.