The weather was bad, and the golf links still soggy with the spring
rains. Her wardrobe was long ago replenished, and that small
interest gone.
And somehow there had opened a breach between herself and the little
intimate group that had been hers before the war. She wondered
sometimes what they would think of Louis Akers. They would admire
him, at first, for his opulent good looks, but very soon they would
recognize what she knew so well--the gulf between him and the men
of their own world, so hard a distinction to divine, yet so real for
all that. They would know instinctively that under his veneer of
good manners was something coarse and crude, as she did, and they
would politely snub him. She had no name and no knowledge for the
urge in the man that she vaguely recognized and resented. But she
had a full knowledge of the obsession he was becoming in her mind.
"If I could see him here," she reflected, more than once, "I'd get
over thinking about him. It's because they forbid me to see him.
It's sheer contrariness."
But it was not, and she knew it. She had never heard of his theory
about the mark on a woman.
She was hating herself very vigorously on that Sunday afternoon.
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