She faced him angrily. “Oh, you’re incomprehensible,” she exclaimed. “You let me see in every possible way that you want me to give myself to you and to follow you into the desert; you let me understand that this is what you expect of a woman; you knew that I had heard about your affairs with the Bedouin women here; you didn’t seem to mind my having heard about Lizette: and then, when I accept your point of view and come to you, you tell me I’ve done wrong.”
“What on earth are you saying?” he cried. “What do you mean about Bedouin women? I have never had any relations whatsoever with native women in my life—never. And as for Lizette, I didn’t tell at the time, because I wanted you to trust me of your own accord; but I will tell you now. I’ve only spoken to her twice in my life. Once we had supper together, and once we had coffee together in a restaurant. That is the beginning and the end of my relationship with her. Do you mean to say that thinking me a sort of libertine, you have come out to live with me here as my mistress for a fortnight? Is that what you mean?”
She did not reply. She sat down on a cane chair near the table, and twisted her handkerchief to and fro with her fingers. The expression on her pale face revealed the black despair of her heart.
“Answer me!” he said, sharply.
“I have no answer,” she replied. “I thought you wanted me, I thought you loved me.”
He turned from her, sick at heart. It seemed now to him that his worst fears were realized: he could almost have called her “Harlot.” In no wise had she abandoned the world and run to him, defying the conventions because she desired to be his mate. She had merely planned a secret love-affair: she had just slipped out of the ballroom, so to speak, to enjoy an amorous interlude, and she would be back amongst the dancers once more before anybody had missed her. This sort of clandestine, cunningly arranged affair was an insult to the whole idea of union: it was an intrigue out of a French novel.
He looked at her once more as she sat at the table, and, in his revulsion of feeling, he thought her kimono gaudy. The expression on her face was angry, almost sullen.
“I think you must be mad,” she said. “In Cairo you wouldn’t be publicly engaged to me, and you made me understand quite clearly that it wasn’t our actual marriage you were thinking about: you wanted me to run away with you. You always jibbed at the thought of marriage, and were silent about it; but you talked freely enough about our life together. You made it quite clear that you regarded morals with contempt; and now, you suddenly have scruples, and pretend that you are shocked at my having taken steps to prevent a scandal which would hurt my father’s reputation.”
“If you were afraid of a scandal,” he answered, quickly, “why did you come at all? When you arrived this afternoon I thought you had left that question to me, and were ready to get married at once, which was the only way to avoid hurting your father—unless I had sent you back this very night to Kate Bindane. No, you weren’t afraid of a scandal: you arranged it all too cleverly for there to be much risk.”
“I was prepared to marry you,” she said, “if you really wanted marriage.”