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Louth's blindness now exasperated her, although she had desperately done her best to close his eyes to the real nature of her feeling for him and to the unexpressed intentions she had formed concerning him and had been forced to abandon. It was maddening to be tacitly rejected as a possible wife and to be enthusiastically claimed as a self-sacrificing friend.
Suddenly she felt safer, as if she could hold up her head once more. Really she had always held it up, but to herself, since Louth's blunt confession, she had been a woman bowed down, old, done with, a thing fit for the scrap heap. Now a slight, almost trembling sensation of returning self-esteem stole through her.
Louth's obstinate reliance on her as a devoted friend of him and his disdainfully vulgar young wife began to irritate Lady Sellingworth almost beyond endurance. She took the letter up with her into the drawing-room, and sat down by the writing-table holding it in her hand. It had come at a dangerous moment.
She resolved to open Rupert Louth's eyes and to make him understand that she and all she stood for were at his disposal. She knew he was up to the eyes in debt. She knew he had no prospects. Lord Blyston had no money to give him, and was for ever in difficulties himself. It was a critical moment for Louth, and a critical moment for her.
She said to herself, or her worn nervous system said to her, that there was nothing else to be done. In her fatigue of body and nerves she felt reckless as only the nearly worn out feel. Something she didn't know what had cast the die for her. It was her fate to open Rupert Louth's eyes, to make him see; it was her fate to force her will into a last strong spasm.
But the untiring Amazon was cracking up, to use a favourite expression of Louth's. Soon the weary, middle-aged woman must claim her miserable rights: the right to be tired occasionally, the right to "slack off" at certain hours of the day, the right to find certain things neither suitable nor amusing to her, the right, in fact, to be now and then a middle-aged woman.
He told her that by this time she must have learnt her lesson, that it was useless to pretend that she had not, that Rupert Louth's marriage had taught her all that she needed to know, and that now she must realize that the time for adventures, for romance, for the secret indulgence of the passions, was in her case irrevocably over. "Fifty! Fifty! Fifty!" he knelled in her ears.
She fought desperately against her physical fatigue, and showed a gay face to the world. But a horrible conviction possessed her. She began presently to feel certain that her effort to live up to Rupert Louth's health and vigour was hastening the aging process in her body. By what she was doing she was marring her chance of preserving into old age the appearance of comparative youth.
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