Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/159

 wise, you will excuse me, I am sure; and will continue to excuse mother."

It was not quite what she had prepared; it was formed from parts of a longer declaration with phrases picked out here and there. She had prepared nothing to say after it; for she had not thought of anything she could say; he must go at once, she thought. When he did not, but merely stood gazing down at her, his glasses on his nose at last, she went white and weak under his scorn as his thin, contemptuous lips parted slightly and he smiled; then she flamed red and furious,—so furious that, if she had been a man, she would have run him out of the house but, being a girl and small, she herself fled upstairs to her room, where she flung herself on her bed and cried and cried.

Below, doors opened and closed, and from outside came the hum of a starting motor. Mr. Stanway had gone; but the fact that she had succeeded in sending him off did not lessen her despair at her own self-degradation. She had never before sunk to such dishonor; she had not even imagined herself one of those capable of resorting to such baseness; and so, perhaps because of this, she had actually prepared her meeting with Mr. Stanway along lines which Rinderfeld had suggested, without realizing how she was involving herself. For not till after she had actually said her words to him and found him gazing down at her in a way he never could have before did she feel how she had degraded herself and demeaned her mother.

Mr. Stanway had said not an audible word to her when she had finished; but the curl of his thin, supercilious lip and the contempt in his little, gray eyes would live with her—she was sure—forever. For she, not her father, had brought contempt upon her family; she