She uttered charming things of madame’s white hands.  And, surely, she had never had the pleasure of seeing madame there before?

Madame replied:  “No; you have never seen me here before.”

She reflected:  “It’s very true, that.  No one had ever seen me, this me, a year ago.”

Just as she had felt no hate for the women in the Royal Red, so her sense of hostility to the girl bending over her hand had vanished.  She was a friendly rival, not to be feared.  And she was not so peerless, after all; there were flaws under the powder with which she coated her pale skin.

“I have never seen prettier nails, madame,” said the manicurist, as she smeared on cream.

After she left the Beauty Parlour Marie had nowhere to go.  There was no Rokeby to give her tea in his comfortable office while he offered her business advice; he had been very good with his advice over the question of Marie’s inheritance.  Neither was there a Julia to ring up and invite to tea at one of the numberless cosy teashops of the West End.  Marie turned in, at three o’clock, to a matinee and bought an upper circle seat, a few minutes late for the rise of the curtain on the first act of an ultra-modern play.

The play was all about marriage.  It dissected marriage into a thousand pieces, and held every piece which was not turned into tragedy up to ridicule.  It fostered all the nonsense which fretted in idle women’s hearts, and touched many sore spots in others; and made men smile cynically as if saying, “That’s got it to the life.”  This play kept Marie Kerr enchained; it set her wondering why the Marriage Service had ever been written and consecrated; it blew to and fro the winds of the storm in her soul until a tempest rocked her mind; she drew a black comparison between the tragedy of the hero and heroine, and the situation between Osborn and herself.  But at last, when the playwright had ridiculed and denounced what he called the oldest and tiredest convention in the world for long enough, the play seemed to turn on a pivot, and the pivot was the cradle.  The playwright gave the playgoers the happy ending for which the world craves and sent them home relieved.

He sent Marie Kerr home relieved, too; but the day had not changed her mind.  She was fixed and, she felt, irrevocably.  Over her solitary dinner she thought of the play; and she thought of the fight to be fought in her own home, and she slept upon it, to awake unmoved in the morning.

She did not want Osborn.

CHAPTER XXI

HOME-COMING

Osborn Kerr was coming home with the happy sense of expectancy which is common to the wanderer.  He had prepared for departure with a high heart and a holiday feeling running through everything, like champagne, but he packed for his return with a very warm pleasure in looking forward to the welcome waiting for him, right across all that space, in the flat an which he had established home.