She pulled her coat about her, though the room had the temperature suited to the great plant of Cattleya, on which there might have been thirty blooms, which stood in the center of the table. With rapid, nervous movements she picked up a spoon and tasted the grapefruit before her. A taste, and she pushed it away, nervously, rapidly. Nervously, rapidly, she glanced at Tom, glancing off somewhere else as if the sight of him hurt her eyes.
"How long have you been back?"
He gave her the dates and places connected with his recent movements.
"Did you like it over there?"
He made the reply he had given to Lily.
"Were you ever wounded?"
He said he had once received a bad cut on the shoulder which had kept him a month in hospital, but otherwise he had not suffered.
"Tad's lost his right arm. Did you know that?"
He had first got this news from Guy Ansley. He was very sorry. At the same time, when others had been so horribly mangled, it was something to escape with only the loss of a right arm.
She gave him another of her hurried, unwilling glances. "How did you come to know the Ansleys so well?"