But the visit of Lady Macmaster had certainly revived her bitterness as it had suggested to her new schemes of making herself a nuisance to the household below her. Lady Macmaster, in widow’s weeds of the most portentous crape, that gave to her at once the elegance and the direness of a funeral horse, had really seemed more than a little out of her mind. She had asked Sylvia’s opinion of all sorts of expedients for making Christopher loosen his grip, and she had continued her supplications even in correspondence. At last she had hit on a singular expedient. … Some years before, apparently, Edith Ethel had had an affair of the heart with a distinguished Scottish Littérateur, now deceased. Edith Ethel, as was well known, had acted the Egeria to quite a number of Scottish men of letters. That was natural; the Macmasters’ establishment was Scottish, Macmaster had been a Critic and had had Government funds for the relief of indigent men of letters, and Edith Ethel was passionately cultured. You could see that even in the forms her crape took and in how she arranged it around her when she sat or agitatedly rose to wring her hands.
But the letters of this particular Scot had out-passed the language of ordinary Egerianishness. They spoke of Lady Macmaster’s eyes, arms, shoulders, feminine aura. … These letters Lady Macmaster proposed to entrust to Christopher for sale to Transatlantic collectors. She said they ought to fetch £30,000 at least, and with the ten percent commission that Christopher might take, he might consider himself as amply repaid for the four thousand odd that Macmaster’s estate owed him.
And this had appeared to Sylvia to be so eccentric an expedient that she had felt the utmost pleasure in suggesting that Edith Ethel should drive up to Tietjens’s with her letters and have an interview—if possible with Valentine Wannop in the absence of Tietjens. This, she calculated, would worry her rival quite a little—and even if it did not do that, she, Sylvia, would trust herself to obtain subsequently from Edith Ethel a great many grotesque details as to the Wannop’s exhausted appearance, shabby clothing, worn hands.
For it is to be remembered that one of the chief torments of the woman who has been abandoned by a man is the sheer thirst of curiosity for material details as to how that man subsequently lives. Sylvia Tietjens, for a great number of years, had tormented her husband. She would have said herself that she had been a thorn in his flesh. That was largely because he had seemed to her never to be inclined to take his own part. If you live with a person who suffers from being put upon a good deal, and if that person will not assert his own rights, you are apt to believe that your standards as gentleman and Christian are below his, and the experience is lastingly disagreeable. But, in any case, Sylvia Tietjens had had reason to believe that for many years, for better or for worse—and mostly for worse—she had been the dominating influence over Christopher Tietjens. Now, except for extraneous annoyances, she was aware that she could no longer influence him either for evil or for good. He was a solid, foursquare lump of meal sacks too heavy for her hauling about.
So that the only real pleasure that she had was when, at night, in a circle of cosy friends, she could assert that she was not even yet out of his confidence. Normally she would not—the members of her circle would not have—made confidantes of her ex-husband’s domestics. But she had had to chance whether the details of Christopher’s ménage as revealed by the wife of his carpenter would prove to her friends sufficiently amusing to make her friends forget the social trespass she committed in consorting with her husband’s dependents, and she had to chance whether the carpenter’s wife would not see that, by proclaiming her wrongs over the fact that her husband had left her, she was proclaiming her own unattractiveness.
She had hitherto chanced both, but the time, she was aware, was at hand when she would have to ask herself whether she would not be better off if she were what the French call rangée as the wife of the Commander-in-Chief in India than as a freelance woman owing her popularity entirely to her own exertions. It would be slightly ignominious to owe part of her prestige to a pantaloon like General Lord Edward Campion, K.C.B., but how restful might it not be! To keep your place in a society of Marjies and Beatties—and even of Cammies, like the Countess of Fittleworth—meant constant exertion and watchfulness, even if you were comfortably wealthy and wellborn—and it meant still more exertion when your staple capital for entertainment was the domestic misfortunes of a husband that did not like you.
She might well point out to Marjie, Lady Stern, that her husband’s clothes lacked buttons and the wife of his companion all imaginable chic; she might well point out to Beattie, Lady Elsbacher, that according to her husband’s carpenter’s wife, the interior of her husband’s home resembled a cave encumbered with packing cases in dark-coloured wood, whereas in her day … Or she might even point out to Cammie, Lady Fittleworth, to Mrs. de Bray Pape and Mrs. Lowther, that, having a defective water-supply, her husband’s woman probably provided him only with difficulty with baths. … But every now and then someone—as had been the case once or twice with the three American ladies—would
