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Page 58
She watched his smoke-ring. The air had carried it
slowly away from him, and brought it out intact upon the landing.
"Two hundred and five--eighty-two. In any case I shall
put them on Bari, not on Florence. I cannot tell you why; I
have a feeling this week for Bari." Again she tried to
speak. But the ring mesmerized her. It had become vast and
elliptical, and floated in at the reception-room door.
"Ah! you don't care if you get the profits. You won't
even say 'Thank you, Gino.' Say it, or I'll drop hot,
red-hot ashes on you. 'Thank you, Gino--'"
The ring had extended its pale blue coils towards her.
She lost self-control. It enveloped her. As if it was a
breath from the pit, she screamed.
There he was, wanting to know what had frightened her,
how she had got here, why she had never spoken. He made her
sit down. He brought her wine, which she refused. She had
not one word to say to him.
"What is it?" he repeated. "What has frightened you?"
He, too, was frightened, and perspiration came starting
through the tan. For it is a serious thing to have been
watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when
we believe ourselves to be alone.
"Business--" she said at last.
"Business with me?"
"Most important business." She was lying, white and
limp, in the dusty chair.
"Before business you must get well; this is the best wine."
She refused it feebly. He poured out a glass. She
drank it. As she did so she became self-conscious. However
important the business, it was not proper of her to have
called on him, or to accept his hospitality.
"Perhaps you are engaged," she said. "And as I am not
very well--"
"You are not well enough to go back. And I am not engaged."
She looked nervously at the other room.
"Ah, now I understand," he exclaimed. "Now I see what
frightened you. But why did you never speak?" And taking
her into the room where he lived, he pointed to--the baby.
She had thought so much about this baby, of its welfare,
its soul, its morals, its probable defects. But, like most
unmarried people, she had only thought of it as a word--just
as the healthy man only thinks of the word death, not of
death itself. The real thing, lying asleep on a dirty rug,
disconcerted her. It did not stand for a principle any
longer. It was so much flesh and blood, so many inches and
ounces of life--a glorious, unquestionable fact, which a man
and another woman had given to the world. You could talk to
it; in time it would answer you; in time it would not answer
you unless it chose, but would secrete, within the compass
of its body, thoughts and wonderful passions of its own.
And this was the machine on which she and Mrs. Herriton and
Philip and Harriet had for the last month been exercising
their various ideals--had determined that in time it should
move this way or that way, should accomplish this and not
that. It was to be Low Church, it was to be
high-principled, it was to be tactful, gentlemanly,
artistic--excellent things all. Yet now that she saw this
baby, lying asleep on a dirty rug, she had a great
disposition not to dictate one of them, and to exert no more
influence than there may be in a kiss or in the vaguest of
the heartfelt prayers.
But she had practised self-discipline, and her thoughts
and actions were not yet to correspond. To recover her
self-esteem she tried to imagine that she was in her
district, and to behave accordingly.
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