And had it been love? This was the question which now shook her puzzled and tortured brain, and banished all hope of sleep. Was it but an imperious pride outraged, a secure sense of possession shattered, that had lashed her into a berserk rage? Vanity, perhaps, that had been fed and watered into an abnormal growth for twenty-four years, first by the power she wielded over men, then by the far more heady incense of the public,—could that be it, mere vanity screaming with rage at this defeat by a silly little American girl? She knew the type, had seen hundreds of them in her many trips to Paris; moreover, she had seen this Mabel Cutting several times during the conspicuous beauty’s sojourn in Munich, she had sat almost beside her at a performance of _Fidelio_ one night. The girl was beautiful and patrician, no doubt accomplished as girls ran; she was the sort that the American youth was falling in love with every hour, but she was not the girl to bewitch John Ordham, for the type was shallow, vain, soulless, hopelessly unintellectual. If he had fallen a victim to the race, he must have been engineered by very clever women. She knew him well enough to be sure that, left to himself, although he might have thought it best to marry the girl, he never would have fallen in love with her—the real Mabel Cutting—unless something besides gold dust had been thrown into his eyes. There had been extraordinarily clever scheming somewhere. She could but guess its nature, but she knew Ordham. His mind had artfully been lulled, and his mere youth and sex manipulated with the modern sorceries of tact and diplomacy.
And the real Ordham belonged to her. The blood rose to her head once more as she was forced to admit that the fine flower of his awakening would not be hers, was irretrievably given to a little fool whom he would hate, not merely tire of, before a year was out.
And this she could have had. She knew it now as she recalled certain moments when she had caught him looking at her with heavy eyes, or a strange stare as of something stirring and quivering in the depths of his being. But she had slurred over these dangerous moments, and without so much as a flush of self-consciousness. Not only had she finished with the masculinities, but she was not the woman to want the love she must rouse, engineer, reveal to itself. With all her tyrannous strength of will she was woman personified, and she must be wooed and won imperiously, or she should prefer to love alone.