“Whatever is wrong,” said she. “Are you ill?”

“B’God I’m not ill, but I’m fed up,” said Molloy. “Seein’ you day after day, growin’ lovelier and lovelier and—oh hell! Monica, you’ve got to be good to me; that fella’ll ruin you, and never think the toss of a button about it. I could love you—I could teach you—God, there’s nothing I’d not do for you! You’ll say I’m old, but it’s not the truth. I could be young for you, my darlin’, I could! Be kind to me; I’m begging you!”

He looked almost ill, as he squirmed on his knees on the floor in front of her, and he seemed to be in a torment of passion that was partly physical desire, for at one point he seized Monica’s right leg beneath her skirt and kneaded it painfully. He smelled of drink, but it was not drink that ailed him.

“Mr Molloy, what can I do for you? You mustn’t go on like that. Tell me what’s the matter. No! Stop that, or I’ll have to go away.”

He raised a terrible, tear-swollen face to her, and groaned. “I want you,” he said. “I love you.”

“But—you mustn’t; it won’t do.”

“Oh, it won’t do, won’t it? Well, if you don’t want to be decent, b’God we’ll be indecent! And no surprise to you, either. It won’t be the first time for you, nor the tenth, nor the hundredth, so shut up and keep still!”

So this is rape, thought Monica, strangely cool, as she was dragged down upon the fusty carpet of the box. The Venetian Domino outfit included a large lace fan, mounted on heavy sticks, a formidable bludgeon; she cracked Molloy smartly over the skull with it, as he snuffled and puffed above her. His face grew small with pain; all its features seemed to draw together; she gave him a shove and he rolled over on the floor, still too hurt to utter.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said Monica, in what she felt to be a schoolmistressy way. But what was there to say? “What ever made you do such a beastly thing?”

But Molloy could not answer. She wriggled over the floor, impeded by her large panniered skirt, to a point where she could hold his head in her lap and nurse it. After a time he was able to open his eyes. And again she asked him: “What made you do such a thing?”

“I love you,” he sobbed, with tears of pain and despair running down his cheeks. “Oh.God, you can’t know what I’ve been through, with the thought of you and that fella.—And now they say you’re keepin’ him; your fancy-man.—Shouldn’t I have known what was goin’ on, the way your lower octave kept gettin’ stronger and richer?—If you’re meat for him, why the hell aren’t you meat for me? I could do miracles for you. I could make you famous. I wouldn’t drag you down and ruin you.—But I’m just an old fella to you—an old fool. Aw God, that’s the hell of it.”

He wept, and Monica wept with him, but it cannot be pretended that they understood each other. Two puritanisms were in conflict, and could not meet. But under that, in a realm below the morality which was bred in the bone, they wept for the sadness of all unrequited love, all ill-matched passion, and the prancing rhythm of The Veleta mounted to them like the indifference of a world where all loves were happy.

The door of the box opened a crack, and someone peeped in; then it opened fully, and admitted a short figure in a purple domino and a mask. Outside the mask it wore a gleaming pair of steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Get up outa that, Murt, and come on home,” said the figure.

Molloy started. “Norah!” said he.

“Myself,” said the purple domino. “Did you think you’d given me the slip, my fine wee fella? Come on now, and don’t trouble Miss Gall anymore.”

Molloy got unsteadily to his feet, helped by Monica. The purple domino, hands on hips, offered no assistance. He was a sorry figure, for one side of his moustache was gone, and the paint on his eyebrows had run down his face in streaks. Without a word to Monica he went through the door.

“You’d better not come for any more lessons till you hear from me,” said the purple domino. “He won’t be himself for a few days. Och, these artists! You’d better be married to a barometer; up and down, up and down all the time.”

“Are you Mrs Molloy?”

“I am. And I’ve no word of blame for you, my girl, though I advise you to watch your step in future with himself. He can’t resist a good pupil; wants to run away with ‘em all. But I’ve always kept him respectable, and please God I always will. Which isn’t light work, in the line we’re all in. But it’s lose that, and lose all.”

And such is the power of anything which is said with a sufficient show of certainty that Monica, who was robbing her benefactors to maintain her lover, nodded solemnly in agreement as the door of the box closed behind the purple domino.

“I am entirely agreed that Miss Gall should come home if this family crisis demands it,” said Miss Pottinger, “but you have not yet fully convinced me that it is the duty of the Bridgetower Trust to pay her expenses.”

The other trustees groaned in spirit. During the three years of the Trust’s existence Miss Puss, contentious by nature, had grown even more insupportable. She fancied herself in the role of a keen woman of business, husbanding money which these foolish men would have squandered; she demanded elaborate and repetitive explanations of the obvious; she made notes in a little book while the others were speaking, thereby missing much of the point of what was said; she pawed through all the bills and lawyer’s statements, demanding explanations and comparing costs with some standard of expenditure adopted by herself in her youth, and now invalid. Although she was believed to be nearly eighty, she had an appetite for committee-work which exhausted Solly, the Dean and Mr Snelgrove. They all, in their various ways, hated her.

It was half-past ten, and the Bridgetower house, now so meagrely heated by Solly, was growing colder; since half-past eight they had been chewing away at a single decision. Mr Snelgrove decided to allow himself the luxury of a calculated loss of temper.

“Let me repeat once more that I fully realize that I am merely the solicitor and legal adviser of this Trust,” said he, “but I urge you with all the force at my command to seize this opportunity of spending some of the Trust money. If it is not done willingly, you may find yourselves compelled to do it unwillingly. I have told you repeatedly that the Public Trustee is disturbed by the way in which your funds are accumulating. Unless you want an investigation, and all the disagreeable circumstances which will come with it, you had better snatch at this chance to spend two or three thousand dollars. Miss Gall’s mother is reported to be seriously ill; she fears that she may die, and she wants to see her daughter. If she dies, and it comes out that you have denied her daughter the means of visiting her, you will not like what people will say. You will not like it at all.”

“Has Miss Gall no funds in hand?” demanded Miss Puss. “She has received a very substantial allowance, and of late her expenditures have been remarkably heavy—far heavier than can be justified by a student life. I have said that she may come home for a time, so far as I am concerned. But we are empowered under the will of the late Louisa Hansen Bridgetower—whose memory seems to be growing very misty in your minds—only to spend money on her artistic education. Can this jaunt be justified on those grounds? That is what I want to know.”

“Personally I do not care the toss of a button whether the journey is educational or not,” said Srielgrove. “But you had better understand this: Mrs Bridgetower left, when all charges were paid, rather more than a million dollars to this Trust. As invested, that brings in roughly $31,000 a year to be spent on this wretched girl, after all taxes on income and property are paid; spend as she will, and reckoning my own expenses and those of my London colleagues, and the money for travel abroad, and the fees of the teachers, there is still about $45,000 of unspent money in our funds, to which we have no right. The Public Trustee wants to know when we are going to spend it, and he wants it spent as soon as possible.”