Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/185
left the house save on business visits to the City. She had chosen her present abode because the rooms were large and inexpensive, because she had chanced to hear something of the antecedents of Mrs. Crawley, and because she thought that here she was not likely to encounter anyone who had known her as Elsa Vane.
"She had seen Tom Vane in The Strand."
She had had no very clear reason for adopting her mother's name in preference to her own, save that the latter had grown distasteful, and painfully suggestive. Now, Elizabeth Poyntz was a useful signature, and she retained it. Five years' struggle with fortune had wearied her; as a painter she had met with no very marked success; latterly she had added the writing of fiction to her original profession, and here old associations came to her aid, helping to lift her out of the rawness of amateur effort. Still, at five-and-twenty life seemed a dull, monotonous plane, and an uncontrollable longing drove her home. She had developed at any rate in patience, and realized, if not herself, some of the harder truths of life. She would not own to herself a desire to tread the same pavement, breathe the same air as Tom Vane; she said that the fascination of the great town, murky and fog-laden, was upon her. She had occasionally heard of her husband through the newspapers. He had written another novel, realistic and philosophic, which had been well reviewed, and he still edited the London Month. She read the book, and judged that he had deteriorated; she thought the tone cynical and worldly, and could detect nothing favourable to any second overture on her part, had she felt the desire to make it.
For the rest, she was utterly alone; her aunt, Miss Poyntz, was dead, and the house at Cambridge in the hands of strangers. That news had reached her when in Paris. Since that time she had travelled constantly, studying both in Belgium and in Rome, until her restless craving led her back to England. She thought she had attained indifference, and had grown quiescent; but the vitality of sensation is apt at startling revival, oversetting all calculation.
One afternoon she returned from the City with a face strangely moved from its usual passivity. She had seen Tom Vane in the Strand. She, herself, had been unnoticed; she had watched him pass from the doorway of a shop. He was very much aged; more than the lapse of five years would reasonably account for. His beard was grey instead of black, and he stooped slightly. Elsa watched him until he was out of sight; she felt a sort of rage against her fate and against his hardness, against the man he was walking with, which must have been a form of unreasonable jealousy. When disturbance has once set