wlling voice
speaking to her husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the
acquaintance between herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of
tyranny, as if the acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were
a worse act of tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course.
How could Lord Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as
he had? And what reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down
within her as woman's instinct. No man could have understood it.

And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash
Carey.

She began to think about Carey.

How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two
things--either terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd--disgusting
and absurd. It had been better for him if he had been terrible. But
mumblings and tears! She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin
Pierce--that something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are
the children of the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that
he was capable of doing something great. What an irony that her remark
to Robin had been succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the
ugly sound of Carey's incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp
clasp of his hot, weak hand, and saw again the tears running over his
flushed, damp face. It was all very nauseous. And yet--had she been
wrong in what she had said of him? Did she even think that she had been
wrong now, after what had passed?

What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a
chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself
that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And
then she remembered Carey's eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always
thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them,
something to hold a woman--no, perhaps not that--but something to
startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And
the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity,
its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any
self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon
Lady Holme by that something in Carey's eyes. What she had said to Robin
Pierce she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose
ever to say it again--of that she was certain--but she had not ceased to
think it.

A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to