The curling line of her lips, as they closed on each other, said all the rest; all the cruel truths about his unspeakable, inane, coarse follies, his laziness, his excesses, his lies, his deceptions, his bad faith, his truculence, his improvidence, his shameful waste and ruin of his life and hers.
She doubted whether he realized his baseness and her wrongs, but if he could not read them in her silent contumely, she was too proud to recite them to him.
She had never complained, save in uncontrolled moments of anger.
"If that's the way you're going to talk--all right!" he snapped, furious.
Evidently he was baffled.
She kept silence.
She was determined to see what he would do in the face of her inaction.
"You know, I'm not joking," he pursued.
"We shall starve."
"Very well," she agreed.
"We shall starve."
She watched him surreptitiously, and she was almost sure that he really had come to the end of his tether.
His voice, which never alone convinced, carried a sort of conviction now.
He was penniless.
In four years he had squandered twelve thousand pounds, and had nothing to show for it except an enfeebled digestion and a tragic figure of a wife.
One small point of satisfaction there was--and all the Baines in her clutched at it and tried to suck satisfaction from it--their manner of travelling about from hotel to hotel had made it impossible for Gerald to run up debts.
A few debts he might have, unknown to her, but they could not be serious.
So they looked at one another, in hatred and despair.
The inevitable had arrived.
For months she had fronted it in bravado, not concealing from herself that it lay in waiting.
For years he had been sure that though the inevitable might happen to others it could not happen to him.
There it was!
He was conscious of a heavy weight in his stomach, and she of a general numbness, enwrapping her fatigue.
Even then he could not believe that it was true, this disaster.
As for Sophia she was reconciling herself with bitter philosophy to the eccentricities of fate.
Who would have dreamed that she, a young girl brought up, etc?
Her mother could not have improved the occasion more uncompromisingly than Sophia did-- behind that disdainful mask.
"Well--if that's it ...!" Gerald exploded at length, puffing.
And he puffed out of the room and was gone in a second.
II
She languidly picked up a book, the moment Gerald had departed, and tried to prove to herself that she was sufficiently in command of her nerves to read.
For a long time reading had been her chief solace.
But she could not read.
She glanced round the inhospitable chamber, and thought of the hundreds of rooms--some splendid and some vile, but all arid in their unwelcoming aspect--through which she had passed in her progress from mad exultation to calm and cold disgust.
The ceaseless din of the street annoyed her jaded ears.
And a great wave of desire for peace, peace of no matter what kind, swept through her.
And then her deep distrust of Gerald reawakened; in spite of his seriously desperate air, which had a quality of sincerity quite new in her experience of him, she could not be entirely sure that, in asserting utter penury, he was not after all merely using a trick to get rid of her.
She sprang up, threw the book on the bed, and seized her gloves.
She would follow him, if she could.
She would do what she had never done before--she would spy on him.
Fighting against her lassitude, she descended the long winding stairs, and peeped forth from the doorway into the street.
The ground floor of the hotel was a wine-shop; the stout landlord was lightly flicking one of the three little yellow tables that stood on the pavement.
He smiled with his customary benevolence, and silently pointed in the direction of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette.
She saw Gerald down there in the distance.
He was smoking a cigar.
He seemed to be a little man without a care.
The smoke of the cigar came first round his left cheek and then round his right, sailing away into nothing.
He walked with a gay spring, but not quickly, flourishing his cane as freely as the traffic of the pavement would permit, glancing into all the shop windows and into the eyes of all the women under forty.
This was not at all the same man as had a moment ago been spitting angry menaces at her in the bedroom of the hotel.
It was a fellow of blithe charm, ripe for any adventurous joys that destiny had to offer.