Besides she despised Florence so haughtily that she could not imagine Edward's being attracted by her.
And she and Maisie were a sort of bulwark round him.
She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on Florence—for Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's ears.
And Leonora desperately desired that her union with Edward should appear to be flawless.
But all that went....
With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and uplifted eyes, she knew that it had all gone.
She knew that that gaze meant that those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind—about their likes and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage.
She knew what it meant that she, when we all four walked out together, had always been with me ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward.
She did not imagine that it had gone further than talks about their likes and dislikes, about their natures or about marriage as an institution. But, having watched Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that the thing was unavoidable.
Edward was such a serious person.
She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would be to rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have before told you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that the seducing of a woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for life.
And that touching of hands, she knew, would give that woman an irrevocable claim—to be seduced.
And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid.
There are very decent parlour-maids.
And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that Maisie Maidan had a real passion for Edward; that this would break her heart—and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that.
She went, for the moment, mad.
She clutched me by the wrist; she dragged me down those stairs and across that whispering Rittersaal with the high painted pillars, the high painted chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad enough.
She ought to have said:
"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress.. ." That might have done the trick.
But, even in her madness, she was afraid to go as far as that.
She was afraid that, if she did, Edward and Florence would make a bolt of it, and that, if they did that, she would lose forever all chance of getting him back in the end.
She acted very badly to me.
Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the interests of a Philadelphia Quaker.
That is all right—I daresay the Church of Rome is the more important of the two.
A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence had become Edward's mistress.
She waited outside Florence's door and met Edward as he came away.
She said nothing and he only grunted.
But I guess he had a bad time.
Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was extraordinary; it smashed up her whole life and all her chances.
It made her, in the first place, hopeless—for she could not see how, after that, Edward could return to her—after a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar woman.
His affair with Mrs Basil, which was now all that she had to bring, in her heart, against him, she could not find it in her to call an intrigue.
It was a love affair—a pure enough thing in its way.
But this seemed to her to be a horror—a wantonness, all the more detestable to her, because she so detested Florence.
And Florence talked....
That was what was terrible, because Florence forced Leonora herself to abandon her high reserve—Florence and the situation.
It appears that Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me or to Leonora.
Confess she had to.
And she pitched at last on Leonora, because if it had been me she would have had to confess a great deal more.
Or, at least, I might have guessed a great deal more, about her "heart", and about Jimmy.
So she went to Leonora one day and began hinting and hinting.
And she enraged Leonora to such an extent that at last Leonora said:
"You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress.
You can be.
I have no use for him."
That was really a calamity for Leonora, because, once started, there was no stopping the talking.
She tried to stop—but it was not to be done.
She found it necessary to send Edward messages through Florence; for she would not speak to him.
She had to give him, for instance, to understand that if I ever came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair.
And it complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at about this time, was really a little in love with her.
He thought that he had treated her so badly; that she was so fine.