She heard his step outside and his voice calling "Susan, where are you?" but she did not look up when he opened the door. Only Lady Susan saw his startled glance of recognition. It confirmed what she had already guessed. She watched the two of them with the zest she would have given to a prize fight.
Maggy took her eyes from the photograph and set it down on the table so that from where he stood Woolf could see that it was his.
"No. I don't know that--gentleman," she said with calm incisiveness. And then, as if she had only just become aware of his presence, looked straight at him. The absence of all recognition in that look was quite perfectly done. With her eyes still on him she moved to the door and paused there.
And then she addressed him in the tone one adopts toward a person who exhibits a lack of ordinary manners.
She passed out, band playing, flags flying.
Somewhere about three o'clock Maggy got back to her flat. She was as calm as death, and knew exactly what she had to do. In her nature there were few complexities: intuition guided her most of the time. Now she simply did not want to live. She was not only heart-broken because of Woolf's desertion but utterly crushed in spirit at having discovered that every foolish ideal with which she had endowed him had had no existence except in her imagination. That reflection made her despise herself as much as she despised him. If the breach could have occurred without such callous perfidy on his part, she might still have retained her self-respect. How much more preferable that would have been, even though it meant she might have gone on loving him.
How she had loved him! She had poured out to him all the passionate first-love of an exceedingly ardent nature; she had gloried in him, suffered for him. She had been content with an illicit position, even to the extent of refraining from urging him to legitimize their union when there was a reason for it--one that would have stirred the compassion of any other man. She had not thought herself good enough to be his wife, because, in effect if not in direct words, he had told her so. She saw him now as he really was, an unutterable cad, despicable, utterly snobbish. He had married with the sole object of associating himself with a titled family. That it was in bad odor made no difference to him. To hear the announcement or to read in print of "Mr. Woolf and the Lady Susan Woolf" had no doubt been the prevailing factor with him. It was clear enough to Maggy. He had not considered her a fit wife for himself because she was a chorus-girl, yet he had married a woman infinitely more common in the slangy sister of a decadent peer.