"Oh, I can't, I can't," said Dodo passionately; "let me sit here a little while, and then go away somewhere else. I can bear it better alone. I can't see Chesterford."
"No, Dodo," she said, "you must not be cowardly. I know it is the worst part of it for you. But your duty lies with him. You must comfort him. You must make him feel that he has got you left. He is terribly broken, but he will be brave for your sake. Be brave for his."
"I suppose you are right," she said; "I will come."
She turned and looked round on to the gay scene. The Row was full of riders, and bright with the flooding sunlight.
"Oh, it is cruel," she said. "I only wanted to be happy, and I mayn't even be that. What is the good of it all, if I mayn't enjoy it? Why was the baby ever born? I wish it never had been. What good does it do anyone that I should suffer?"
Mrs. Vivian felt horribly helpless and baffled. How could she appeal to this woman, who looked at everything from only her own standpoint?
They drove back in silence. Chesterford was standing in the hall as they entered, waiting for them. He came forward to meet Dodo.
"My poor, poor darling," he said, "it is very hard on you. But we can bear it together, Dodo."
Dodo turned from him passionately, and left him standing there.
Dodo was sitting in the window of her morning-room late on the same afternoon. She and Lord Chesterford had been together to look at the baby as it lay there, with the little features that had been racked and distorted with pain, calm and set again, as if it only slept; and Dodo had at that moment one real pang of grief. Her first impulse, as we have seen, was one of anger and impatience at the stupidity of destiny. She had been enjoying herself, in a purely animal way so intensely, at that moment when she saw Mrs. Vivian waiting for her under the trees. She was just released from a tedious period of inactivity, and inactivity was to Dodo worse than anything in the Inferno.
"I daresay I should get accustomed to being roasted," she had said once to Miss Grantham. "It really would be rather interesting seeing your fingers curling up like fried bacon, but imagine being put in a nicely-furnished room with nobody to talk to, and a view over Hyde Park one side and Melton Mowbray the other, and never being able to get out! The longer that lasted, the worse it would become." And so she had felt the sort of rapture with which "the prisoner leaps to loose his chains" when she had gone out that morning, and again knew the infinite delight of feeling a fine horse answer to her hand, under a sort of playful protest. Then this had come upon her, and Dodo felt that language, failed her to express her profound contempt and dislike for the destiny that shapes our ends.