"I don't see anything so particularly absurd about it. When I thought you couldn't marry, I didn't ask you to. When you told me you could, I did. What's the matter with that?"
"Why, you are—and I am—very much the matter with it! But don't fly out at me, Bob. I might have flown out at you, but I didn't."
"Oh, you got home all right in your own way. You've made me look an ass." His tone expressed a grudging resentful admiration; his glance was of the same order. He was furious, and Winnie, in her animation and triumph, was very pretty.
"I don't see that it's altogether my doing. I think you helped. Come, don't be cross. You know that you're most awfully relieved. Your face, as you considered the question, was a study in consternation."
He was certainly relieved about the marriage; but he was disappointed and hurt about the trip to Monte Carlo. If she had 'flown out' at him in moral indignation, that would have been intelligible, though, again, in his opinion hardly consistent, conduct on her part; as it was, she had called him, not a scoundrel, but a goose, and had played her trick on him with a smiling face, looking the while most attractive and hopelessly unapproachable.
"Well, I mean what I say. My offer stands. Perhaps you'll think better of your answer." His voice was doggedly angry now. He plainly suggested that she—in her position—might go farther and fare worse.
Winnie did not miss the hint, but let it pass with a gay contempt.
"I won't quarrel; I don't mean to. If I had, I should have quarrelled at the beginning." She jumped up from her chair, and laid a hand on his arm. "Let's forgive each other, Bob!"
Under a sudden impulse he caught her round the waist. Winnie's figure stiffened into a sudden rigidity, but she made no other movement. Bob's arm fell away again; he walked off towards a chair behind the door, on which he had left his hat and gloves. "I expect I'd better go," he said, in an unsteady voice, without turning his head towards her.
"Please, Bob."