The Powers and Maxine

								

Californian widow) came into my father's house in New York, she does
know how to manage me better than anyone else, when I am in such moods.
I could have screamed for her, as I sat there helplessly looking through
the open doors: and then, at last, I saw her, as if my wish had been a
call which had reached her ears over the music in the ballroom.
She had stopped dancing, and with her partner (Lord Robert, again)
entered the room which lay between our "den" and the ballroom, Probably
they would have gone on to the conservatory, which can be reached in
that way, but I cried her name as loudly as I could, and she heard. Only
a moment she paused--long enough to send Lord Robert away--and then she
came straight to me. He must have been furious: but I didn't care for
that.
I had been wanting her badly, but when I saw her, so bright and
beautiful, looking as if she were the joy of life made incarnate, I
should have liked to strike her hard, first on one cheek and then the
other, deepening the rose to crimson, and leaving an ugly red mark for
each finger.
"Have you a headache, dear?" she asked, in that velvet voice she keeps
for me--as if I were a thing only fit for pity and protection.
"It's my heart," said I. "It feels like a clock running down. Oh, I wish
I could die, and end it all! What's the good of me--to myself or
anyone?"
"Don't talk like that, my poor one," she said. "Shall I take you
upstairs to your own room?"
"No, I think I should faint if I had to go upstairs," I answered. "Yet I
can't stay here. What shall I do?"
"What about Uncle Eric's study?" Di asked. She always calls Lord
Mountstuart 'Uncle Eric,' though he isn't her uncle. Her mother and his
wife were sisters, that's all: and then there was the other sister who
married the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a cousin of Lord
Mountstuart's. That family seemed to have a craze for American girls;
but Lord Mountstuart makes an exception of me. He's civil, of course,
because he's an abject slave of Di's, and she refused to come and pay a
visit in England without me: but I give him the shivers, I know very
well: and I take an impish joy in making him jump.
"I'm sure he won't be there this evening," Di went on, when I hesitated.
"He's playing bridge with a lot of dear old boys in the library, or was,
half an hour ago. Come, let me help you there. It's only a step."
She put her pretty arm round my waist, and leaning on her I walked
across the room, out into a corridor, through a tiny "bookroom" where
odd volumes and old magazines are kept, into Lord Mountstuart's study.
It is a nice room, which he uses much as his wife uses her boudoir. The
library next door is rather a show place, but the study has only Lord
Mountstuart's favourite books in it. He writes there (he has written a
novel or two, and thinks himself literary), and some pictures he has
painted in different parts of the world hang on the walls: for he also
fancies himself artistic.