Chesney saw her look at the glass of wine, and said with good-humoured peevishness:
"I see you're wondering at my scant allowance. But that old screw Gaynor is a terrible bully at these times. He knows he has me in his power—confound him! So he keeps me on short rations of everything that's the least pleasant. Besides, the stuff's flat by now, being poured out in a glass like that, instead of served properly in a bottle."
Then the fretful expression left his face, and a look of admiration replaced it.
"By Jove—you look like a lovely gold statue of Diana in that gown! There's something so ineradicably virginal about you—keeps a chap falling in love with you over and over."
Sophy hated the especial voice in which he spoke just then. It was the voice of an amiably inclined Pasha, congratulating himself on his taste in favourites. She had again put on the orange tea-gown that he liked, feeling that she must soften him in every way possible before telling him the painful truth, on his reception of which so much depended. From the full petal-like collar, her throat rose like a white stamen from a gold corolla. Chesney's eyes gloated over her—his chief possession.
"George, but you're a beauty!" he said, with his silent laugh. "And shy! You're wincing this very minute under my praise—my conjugal praise. You know you are—you incorrigible Artemis."
Sophy looked at him thoughtfully, marvelling. Was it possible that he had no clear memory of that dreadful dinner at the House of Commons? Yes. It must be so. With all his latent brutality, he could not have been cognisant of what he had done there, and yet speak and seem like this. And it was very hard to know how to begin. It seemed so terrible a thing to have to bring a look of confusion, of shame even, to that confident, almost condescendingly assured face. She could not divine the wild sense of triumph that filled him, because of the accustomed poison in his veins after his twenty-four hours of enforced fast from it. He felt that his "strength was as the strength of ten," because he felt also the bite of the admirable and abominable drug at his midriff. The sting of the spot where the needle had thrust into his flesh was sweet as the sting left by a kiss to the normal lover. He knew that he risked the danger of an abscess every time that he thrust the needle into his arms or legs, already so thickly punctured. He did not care. Morphia gives this carelessness—this calm recklessness of all that may follow.
"Cecil ..." said Sophy suddenly. She leaned forward and took his hand in both hers. His lids contracted. He recognised the tone in her voice, and it made him uneasy. There was always something disturbing to follow, when Sophy spoke in that tone.
"Well?" he said; and his voice told her, on her side, that he was on the defensive.
"Cecil—your feeling is right. I mean I hear in your voice that you feel I am going to say something that will be painful. But it's ... it's my love for you that makes me say it. You'll believe that, won't you?"