Tommy groaned. “Clementina, darling, tell me, in Heaven’s name, what you’re playing at, or I’ll go raving mad.”
“I told you that one of these days I was going to become a lady. The day has come. Don’t I look like a lady?”
“That’s the devil of it,” he laughed. “You look like an archduchess.”
They picked up Etta and met Quixtus at the Carlton where they lunched in the middle of the great gay room. The young people’s curious awe of the transmogrified Clementina soon melted away. The big, warm-hearted Clementina they loved was unchanged; but to her was added a laughter-evoking, brilliant, joyous personage whose existence they had never suspected. Quixtus went home stimulated and uplifted. He had never enjoyed two hours so much in his life.
And that was the beginning of the glory of Clementina Wing.
Day by day the glory deepened. The pyrotechnic—a flash, a bedazzlement and then darkness—was not in Clementina’s nature. She had deliberately immolated the phœnix of dusky plumage and from its ashes had arisen this second and radiant phœnix incarnation. She suffered, as she confessed to herself, infernally; for a new fire-born phœnix must have its skin peculiarly tender; but she grinned and bore it for the greater glory—well, not of Clementina alone—but of God and her sex and the happiness of those she loved and the things that stood for the right.
She was fighting the interloping woman with her own weapons. She, Clementina, the despised and rejected of men, was pitting her sex’s fascinations against the professional seductress. She had won the first pitched battle. She had swept the enemy from the field. Sheer fierceness of love, almost animal, for the child, sheer pity flaming white for the man grown dear to her, sheer sex, sheer womanhood—these were the forces at work. It would have been easy to denounce the woman to Quixtus. But that might have thrown him back into darkness. Easy, too, to have held her knowledge as a threat over the woman’s head and bade her begone. But where had been the triumph? Where the glory? Whereas to scorn the use of her knowledge and conquer otherwise, therein lay matter for thrilling exultation. It was an achievement worth the struggle.
And the glory of the riot through her veins of the tumultuous Thing she had kept strangled to torpor within her! The Thing that had been stirred by the springtide in a girl’s heart, that had leapt at the parrot tulips in the early May, that had almost escaped from grip on the moonlit night at Vienne, that had remained awake and struggling ever since—the glory to let it go free and carry her whithersoever it would! Art—to the devil with it! What was Art in comparison with this new-found glory?
It made her ten years younger. It took years from the man for whose fascination she brought it into play. Hers was a double conquest, the rout of the woman, the capture of the man. Daily she battled. Sheila, the lovers, a new portrait of him which she suddenly conceived the splendid notion of painting, all were pretexts for keeping the unconscious man within the sphere of her influence. Any impression that the other had made on his heart or his mind should be deleted, and her impression stamped there in its place, so that when he met the other out of her presence, as meet her he undoubtedly must, he would wear it as a talisman against her arts and blandishments. Twice also during the dying days of the season, late that year, she went out into the great world and gave her adversary battle in the open.
It was between these two engagements that she had a talk with Huckaby.