The
empty, brilliantly-lit rooms seemed unusually large. She glanced round
them with inward-looking eyes. Here she was at midnight sitting quite
alone in her own house. And she wished to do something decisive,
startling as the cannon shot sometimes fired from a ship to disperse a
fog wreath. That was the reason why she had told the footman to come in
ten minutes. She thought that in ten minutes she might make up her mind.
If she decided upon doing something that required an emissary the man
would be there.
She looked at the little silver box she had taken up that night when she
was angry, then at the grand piano in the further room. The two things
suggested to her two women--the woman of hot temper and the woman of
sweetness and romance. What was she to-night, and what was she going to
do? Nothing, probably. What could she do? Again she glanced round the
rooms. It seemed to her that she was like an actress in an intense,
passionate /role/, who is paralysed by what is called in the theatre "a
stage wait." She ought to play a tremendous scene, now, at once, but the
person with whom she was to play it did not come on to the stage. She had
worked herself up for the scene. The emotion, the passion, the force, the
fury were alive, were red hot within her, and she could not set them
free. She remained alone upon the stage in a sort of horror of dumbness,
a horror of inaction.
The footman came in quietly with the lemonade on a tray.
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