When they met again a week later, Barnet showed none of his former ardor. Seated across the table from her at an uptown café, he extracted a cigarette from his engraved silver case and smoked it in silence, looking at her calmly—even coldly.
Blanche was fighting back tears. “What has happened?” she said in a tremulous voice. “What has Roland said to you?”1
“He knows I’m interested in you,” said Barnet.
“Have you told him about us?” asked Blanche with a little gasp.
“No, but he knows it,” Barnet said. “He says you are wearing his ring—that you are going to marry him. Is that so?”
Blanche took a moment to answer. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If I did, it would be through selfish motives. He has money—his father is very wealthy. You know how desperately I wish to study music abroad.” She paused for a moment before adding: “But I am not in love with him.”
“Then it is the promise of Europe?” he said, a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Nevertheless, he has made it perfectly plain to me that he wants you and means to marry you. He said I was to keep out of this.”
“How did he come to tell you so much?” Blanche asked.
“Well, you know what good friends we are,” said Barnet with only the slightest hint of irony. “I knew all about your affair from the beginning. He told me all about you, how gay and alive you were, how much in love with life.”
Barnet took a long drag on his cigarette before expelling the smoke from his nostrils. “I know what happened on the yachting trip. He told me that you were a virgin.”
A flush rose to Blanche’s face—not of shame but of anger. Clearly, Roland had let it be known, either directly or by implication, that he had deflowered Blanche on board the Monhegan. It wasn’t the dishonesty of the claim that upset her. She prided herself on being a free spirit, a woman who had overcome the benighted sexual attitudes of her puritanical mother. Had Roland proved capable of performing, she would happily have relinquished her virginity to him.
What sent the blood rushing to her cheeks was her sense of violation. To have been made the subject of such unseemly talk was, she felt, a terrible betrayal—not only by Roland but by Barnet as well.
“And what else did he tell you?” she said, making no attempt to hide her indignation.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry this came up at all. I never intended that you should realize all I know.”
“You must have thought I would be an easy mark,” she said in the same scornful tone. “That’s what men usually think, isn’t it, if they know a woman has already capitulated once to a man?”
“Stop!” he cried. “Don’t say that! You insult both yourself and me. I’ve told you I’m crazy about you.”
A short time later, they drove back in silence to Alice Bellinger’s brownstone. Barnet walked her into the dimly lighted vestibule. In her hands, she clutched the bouquet of gardenias he had brought her. She was still upset at Barnet. But as they stood facing each other in the faint light that filtered in through the delicate grillwork of the entrance doors, she felt the stirrings of that “ecstatic something” which existed between them.
She began to say good night, but before the words were out of her mouth he took her in his arms. “You are trembling,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I won’t let you go.”
Then they were kissing madly.
That night, after Barnet had left, Blanche found herself unable to sleep. Her thoughts were not on her departed lover, but on the man who—even while claiming her as his future bride—had spoken so cavalierly about such intimate matters. “There smoldered within me,” she writes in her memoirs, “a wordless displeasure and the sense of an injury which I felt Roland had dealt to me.”
The next day, she telephoned Roland at the club and demanded that he come see her at once. He arrived within the hour.
“There followed a stormy interview,” Blanche writes. “A meeting between us full of bitterness and reproach.”
Pulling the mizpah ring from her finger, she tossed it onto a table. It bounced from the surface, rolled across the floor, and came to a rest in a far corner of the room.
“Why did you discuss with Barnet what you ought to have kept inviolate?” she cried. “There are things between us that ought to be deep and secret. But you talked of them—boasted to him!”
Roland stiffened, as if he had taken a blow. “That’s a damned lie. I’ve known Barnet for a long time,” he said coldly. “I know the sort of man he is. He will have a fling with you—then forget all about you.”
“You think that?” she said scornfully.
“Has he said anything about marrying you?” Roland asked. “I’ll wager he has not.”
“We’ve never discussed it,” Blanche said. “You yourself know I’m not interested in being married—not now. I want my music and a career.”
“I’ve offered you both,” said Roland. “But why prolong this? It’s getting us nowhere.”
He reached for his hat, which he had tossed onto a chair. “It is ended, you say? Very well, if that’s the way you wish it.” His voice was steady and cool. He bowed to Blanche, then crossed the room.
Just before he disappeared through the doorway, he paused, looked back at her, and with a hard, bitter laugh, said, “Tell Barnet the coast is clear—he wins.”
It was the same apparent admission of defeat he had made to Harry Cornish. And like Cornish, Blanche had no way of knowing just how ominous those words really were.