Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/243

Rh The motor checked at a comer, bubbled to itself, and licked its lips again.

"Oh, my God!" said he.

Lucia's heart suddenly leaped within her. Her own side of the affair she knew thoroughly, but till this moment she had never really known what it meant to him. They had been intimate, in a purely innocent sense, being brought often and much together, each conjecturing in the other something of the nameless positive, the nameless complement, that all men and women seek. Whether he had actually found it or not she did not know. But when he said, "Oh, my God!" she knew. What would be the practical outcome she did not think; she knew nothing except that his interjection meant that he had found. There was the world of regret, of duty, of affection, that yelped behind it; but the true cry, tragic though it was, rose up through it. And even in this moment, which she knew to be supreme in its sensual sort, she could not be honest. Yet she could still mend matters; she could still say, since they pulled up at this moment at Prince's Gate, "Thanks so much, Charlie, for your escort; they will take you back, of course. Good-night."

Instead, she went a step farther. She said: "Oh, come in for ten minutes. The motor will wait and take you back."

That, the motor waiting, was her semblance of an anchor. She did not mean to drift; the chauffeur would be waiting.

She was on the near side of the car, and paused on the pavement for him to follow. He followed, but for a step only.

"I think I'll go back at once," he said hoarsely; "I shall be keeping Maud up."

Lucia turned round. The lights stirred again in her necklace and her tiara; they winked in the sequins, and they blazed in her eyes. He had resisted; therefore she would fight that resistance. It was not tolerable that he should resist her. Besides, she knew well in what spirit his resistance was made—the spirit of loyalty to Maud, fighting desperately. That fed her vanity, and ministered to her insatiable desire of conquest. And even in the same moment as she knew that, she told herself, so amazing was her capacity for self-deception, that his resistance was insulting to herself. Surely with the wife of his cousin, with the greatest friend of his own wife, such scruples were as absurd as they were unjustifiable. It might be loyalty to his wife, for fear of some far-distant incredible conclusion, that prompted resistance, but that same resistance was not loyal to Lucia.