Prosper sipped his tea and listened. He looked at her and was bitterly
conscious that the excitement which had pleased and surprised him was
dying out. That faintness again assailed his spirit. He was feeling
stifled, ashamed, bored. Yes, that was it, bored. That life of service
and battle-danger in France had changed him more than he had realized
till now. He was more simple, more serious, more moral, in a certain
sense. He was like a man who, having denied the existence of Apollyon,
has come upon him face to face and has been burnt by his breath. Such
a man is inevitably moral. All this long, intricate intrigue with the
wife of a man who called him friend, seemed to him horribly unworthy.
If Betty had been a great lover, if she had not lost courage at the
eleventh hour and left him to face that terrible winter in Wyoming,
then their passion might have justified itself: but now there was a
staleness in their relationship. He hated the thought of the long
divorce proceedings, of the decent interval, of the wedding, of the
married life. He had never really wanted that. And now, in the ebb of
his passion, how could he force himself to take her when he had
learned to live more keenly, more completely without her! He would
have to take her, to spend his days and nights with her, to travel
with her. She would want to visit that gay, little forsaken house in a
Wyoming cañon. With vividness he saw a girl lying prone on a black
rug before a dancing fire, her hair all fallen about her face, her
secret eyes lifted impatiently from the book--"You had ought to be
writin', Mr. Gael...."
"What are you smiling for, Prosper?" Betty asked sharply.
He looked up, startled and confused. "Sorry. I've got into beastly
absent-minded habits. Is that Morena?"
Jasper opened the curtains and came in, greeting Prosper in his
stately, charming fashion. "To-night," he said, "we'll show you a
leopardess worth looking at, won't we, Betty? But first you must tell
us about your own experience. You look wonderfully fit, doesn't he,
Betty? And changed. They say the life out there stamps a man, and
they're right. It's taken some of that winged-demon look out of your
face, Prosper, put some soul into it."
He talked and Betty laughed, showing not the slightest evidence of
effort, though the soul Jasper had seen in Prosper's face felt shriveled
for her treachery. Prosper wondered if she could be right in her surmise
about Jasper. The Jew was infinitely capable of dissimulation, but there
was a clarity of look and smile that filled Prosper with doubts. And the
eyes he turned upon his wife were quite as apparently as ever the eyes
of a disappointed man.