“Where to?”
“I dunno.”
He hurried away, shocked, angry. What silly trick was fate playing on him? He must write, cautiously, perhaps to find that she was gone out of his reach.
What an unutterably dreary part of the town was this in which he found himself pursuing the more or less romantic! Dingy vice and dreary respectability inextricably mingled, punctuated by blazing public houses. He hurried through the continuous stream of wayfarers, wondering if any of them knew the meaning of love. It startled him to find how intense had grown his longing for Marian, whom he thought at first he held in his hand, but who now eluded him so persistently.
A man passed him, walking rapidly in the opposite direction. Despite the dim light, he recognized Edward Squire. Then the thought came to him that perhaps Marian had come face to face with the great act of rebellion and had found her courage fail, had fled for safety. He did not believe that she would find safety; once her thirst for the fullness of life had been excited she would quench it. If he did not win her some other man would. He wanted her and would not leave anything undone to possess her.
Again and again the echo of her voice rang in his ears as he hurried along; again her face appealed to him. How glorious it would be to loosen her red-gold hair around her shoulders, to hold her close to him, looking deep into her eyes, his lips on hers; she and he alone.
CHAPTER VI
Both in situation and in itself, Stone’s Hotel is respectable and dull. Desperately so, Marian found it, as she stood looking out of the drawing room window on the sunlit, colorless street. She was alone.
It was an Early Victorian room; heavy, dingy red curtains hung down starkly before the window from a heavy, gilded cornice. The carpet also was dingy red, with faded roses of huge proportions displayed thereon; the walls were covered with dirty gold-and-white paper, chastened by oleographs in clumsy gold frames; over the mantelpiece there was a fly-blown, gilt-framed mirror; the furniture was upholstered in well-worn red velvet, and over the backs of the chairs and sofa were draped dirty white crochet antimacassars; in the center stood a huge round table covered with a green and black cloth and adorned with a careful selection of assorted hotel guides and photograph albums, among which a stray Tauchnitz volume looked sadly out of place; over the whole lay the blight of dust and dreariness.