“I’ve been waiting for you!” She dragged at his hand and not unwillingly he suffered himself to be led to a small sofa. They chatted a few minutes; then danced; Roger simply must look at Martha’s new etchings. The pair was inseparable for the evening. Try as she might Angela could discover no feeling of jealousy but her dignity was hurt. She could not have received less attention from her former lover if they had never met. At first she thought she would make up to Ashley but something malicious in Carlotta’s glance deterred her. No, she was sick of men and their babyish, faithless ways; she did not care enough about Roger to play a game for him. So she sat quietly in a deep chair, smoking, dipping into the scattered piles of books which lent the apartment its air of cheerful disorder. Occasionally she chatted; Ladislas Starr perched on the arm of her chair and beguiled her with gay tales of his university days in prewar Vienna.
But she would never endure such an indignity again. On the way home she was silent. Roger glanced at her curiously, raised his eyebrows when she asked him to come in. She began quietly: “Roger I’ll never endure again the treatment—”
But he was ready, even eager for a quarrel. “It looks to me as though you were willing to endure anything. No woman with an ounce of pride would have stood for what you’ve been standing lately.”
She said evenly: “You mean this is the end? We’re through?”
“Well, what do you think about it? You certainly didn’t expect it to last forever.”
His tone was unbelievably insulting. Eyeing him speculatively she replied: “No, of course I didn’t expect it to last forever, but I didn’t think it would end like this. I don’t see yet why it should.”
The knowledge of his unpardonable manner lay heavy upon him, drove him to fresh indignity. “I suppose you thought some day I’d kiss your hand and say ‘You’ve been very nice to me; I’ll always remember you with affection and gratitude. Goodbye.’ ”
“Well, why shouldn’t you have said that? Certainly I’d expected that much sooner than a scene of this sort. I never dreamed of letting myself in for this kind of thing.”
Some ugly devil held him in its grasp. “You knew perfectly well what you were letting yourself in for. Any woman would know it.”
She could only stare at him, his words echoing in her ears: “You knew perfectly well what you were letting yourself in for.”
The phrase had the quality of a cosmic echo; perhaps men had been saying it to women since the beginning of time. Doubtless their biblical equivalent were the last words uttered by Abraham to Hagar before she fared forth into the wilderness.
V
Long after Roger had left her she sat staring into the dark shadows of the room. For a long time the end, she knew, had been imminent; she had been curious to see how it would arrive, but the thought had never crossed her mind that it would come with harsh words and with vulgarity. The departure of Roger himself—she shut her hand and opened it—meant nothing; she had never loved, never felt for him one-tenth of the devotion which her mother had known for her father, of the spontaneous affection which Virginia had offered Matthew Henson. Even in these latter weeks when she had consciously striven to show him every possible kindness and attention she had done so for the selfish preservation of her ideals. Now she looked back on those first days of delight when his emotions and her own had met at full tide; when she dreamed that she alone of all people in the world was exempt from ordinary law. How, she wondered futilely, could she ever have suffered herself to be persuaded to tamper with the sacred mysteries of life? If she had held in her hand the golden key—love! But to throw aside the fundamental laws of civilization for passion, for the hotheaded wilfulness of youth and to have it end like this, drably, vulgarly, almost in a brawl! How could she endure herself? And Roger and his promises of esteem and golden memories!
For a moment she hated him for his fine words and phrases, hated him for tricking her. No matter what she had said, how she had acted, he should have let her go. Better a wound to her passion than later this terrible gash in her proud assurance, this hurt in the core of herself. “God!” she said, raging in her tiny apartment as a tiger in a menagerie rages in its inadequate cage, “God, isn’t there any place where man’s responsibility to woman begins?”
But she had grown too much into the habit of deliberately ordering her life, of hewing her own path, of removing the difficulties that beset that path, to let herself be sickened, utterly prostrated by what had befallen her. Roger, her companion, had gone; she had been caught up in an inexcusably needless affair without the pretext of love. Thank God she had taken nothing from Roger; she had not sold herself; only bestowed that self foolishly, unworthily. However upset and harassed her mind might be it could not dwell too long on this loss of a lover. There were other problems to consider; for Roger’s passing meant the vanishing of the last hope of the successful marriage which once she had so greatly craved. And even though she had not actively considered this for some time, yet as a remote possibility it had afforded a sense of security.
