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Updated: July 13, 2025
She kept it bent, hidden from him, lifting a programme to shield her utterly from his gaze. He put down his glasses on the ledge of the box. "Do you allow that sort of thing?" Mrs. Durlacher whispered as she took them up. "My God no!" he exclaimed. She smiled in her mind. That word allow was chosen with discretion. As the curtain fell Traill proposed supper at a restaurant. They readily agreed.
She sat in that chair by the fire, gazing at the hissing logs as they spat at the flames that licked them, and felt all the powerlessness, all the impotence, that the frightened rabbit knows when it is caught in the device of the snarer. "Did you come down from Town?" said Mrs. Durlacher, presently. "Yes." "It's a nice drive, isn't it?" "Oh yes, it's lovely."
Durlacher wished it unsaid. For the instant he gazed at her, then his anger was spent. Knowing how wasted that blow was, he turned to the mantelpiece and laughed. It was the most bitter retaliation he could have made. She heard it echoing through her brain as the fallen man, dazed and helpless, just hears the seconds being meted out, yet cannot rise, can lift no voice to stop them.
For that plural of the pronoun, Sally thanked him generously in her heart; for that also, Mrs. Durlacher smiled inwardly and saw visions of the power by which Jack would eventually win his way. "Will you have some coffee?" he added, when she had accepted the chair he proffered. "We've just had some. Good wasn't it, Dolly?" "Excellent." "Will you have some?" he repeated.
It seemed as if they had been placed there at the last moment of birth, with no inner mechanism to answer to sensation. She just said nothing. "To-morrow morning," Mrs. Durlacher repeated. "Yes, madam." "And now you can take the chintz covers off everything in this room and the drawing-room as well.
"My sister's not hitting it off with her husband," Traill told her, that afternoon as they drove back to London. "Is that what she was telling you when I went upstairs to take off my hat?" asked Sally. "Yes." "That was why you kissed her?" "Exactly; did you see me kissing her?" "Yes, when I came into the room." "Yes; well, that's it. I always thought Durlacher was a fool," he added meditatively.
She had to force her eyes to see, and spur her mind to think. Then she turned, facing Mrs. Durlacher. "I think if you're going to judge everybody by their outward appearance," she said, "you certainly might feel inclined to say that he wasn't a gentleman. But outward appearances always seem to me so terribly deceptive. I should never let myself be led away by them." This was a declaration!
They heard him taking the stairs two at a time in the darkness. Then the door slammed. "One of these days he'll break his neck down those stairs," said Mrs. Durlacher. "Do you live in Town, Miss Bishop?" She ran one sentence into the other inconsequently, as if they had connection. "Well not exactly," said Sally. "I live in Kew." "Oh yes Kew it's a very pretty place.
"I shouldn't have told you about him, even then," she continued, "if it hadn't been fairly obvious to me that he was becoming a different sort of person." "Why, what sort of an individual has he been?" Mrs. Durlacher told her. Ah, but she made the telling interesting.
The woman, kissing the hand that strikes her, to shield it from the falling of the law, is a type that has made no history; but in the hearts of men she is to be found with her ineffaceable record. It was against the two women, against Mrs. Durlacher with her damnable cunning, against the other with her still more damnable fascination, that all the blinding acid of Sally's thoughts was cast.
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