"Why do you think you know so much?" Vina veiled her sarcastic reply.
"Mrs. Wilford had been having her husband watched, I learn," prodded Kennedy, with brutal directness.
I glanced covertly over at him. Doyle had told us Wilford was watching his wife. But no one, as I recalled, had given us an inkling of a reverse state of affairs. I realized that Kennedy had made it up out of whole cloth. He was trying it out to see its effect. At any rate, there was nothing unreasonable about it. It might have been true, whether it actually was or not.
For a moment Vina was sorely tried to hold back a quick reply. Then she shrugged again.
"Most women of the sort have to do that," she snapped.
It was a mean remark, besides being glaringly untrue, except in the limited ken of certain New-Yorkese women. Moreover, I saw that Kennedy had slipped past her guard. Each sentence she replied betrayed the keen feeling between the two.
Kennedy seemed to be observing Vina as he might a strange element in a chemical reaction. On her part she seemed intuitively to recognize that there was a challenge to her in Craig's very personality.
Arts which she might have tried with success on another seemed not to impress this man. He seemed to penetrate the defenses which she had against most men. And I could not help seeing that she was piqued by it.
While they were fencing in their verbal duel, Craig had casually drawn a pencil from his pocket. A moment later I saw that he had begun scribbling some figures, apparently aimlessly, on a piece of paper.
From where I was sitting beside him I could see that he had written something like this: