"I don't see what that has to do with me," said he in a stately way; and he tried to move away from her.
Maude clutched him with both hands round his arm, and moved with him. "If it doesn't matter now, it will matter when you get under the same roof with her. Oh!"—looking up at him—"you did know she was there, and you are going after her! You used to sneak to the tea-room on the sly—heaps of people have told me—and now you are going to Wandooyamba just on purpose to make love to her—I can see it in your face, though you have your mask on! Oh! Tony dear, don't—don't be a naughty, bad boy—for my sake!"
"If I have ever been bad—bad to women," said Tony, removing his mask, "that time is over. Don't distress yourself. If I should by chance make love to Miss Liddon, it will be quite respectably, I assure you."
"But that would be worse!" shrieked Maude, coming to a standstill in the middle of the room, horrified. "Oh, Tony, what are you talking about—you, that have always been so fastidious! A tea-room girl! Oh, you are only trying to aggravate me! I didn't save you from Lady Louisa to have you throw yourself away on a tea-room girl!"
He almost shook her, he was so angry with her. "May I ask you to be so very good as to mind your own business, and allow me to manage mine?" he said, with a sort of cold fury in his voice and eyes. It was not the way a son should speak to his mother—indeed, it was quite brutal—but he could not restrain himself; and she, looking at him, guessed what the sudden rage portended.
"It is my business," she retorted, with equal passion. "It is my family's business—it is all our businesses—to see that we are not disgraced."
"Disgraced!" he drawled, with bitter amusement. "Good Lord!"
The white gauze over her bosom heaved like foam on a flowing tide, the gold drops studding it shook like harebells in a breeze.
"Tony," she burst out fiercely, "I shall tell your father of you."
She swept out of the room, and he heard her long tail scraping over the tiles of the hall, and rustling up the broad stairs.