Horatia looked at his handsome, alert face, and did not hasten to answer. Then she said, "I know now why Madame de Vigerie and I are never to meet!"
"But you have always known it!" exclaimed her husband, with every sign of amazement, "Politics——"
She checked him. "Don't say it again—spare me that! Politics! And I have only to go into a milliner's to hear your 'politics' discussed!"
A demeanour of kindly calm descended on Armand. "My dear, you ought not to be standing. If you will only sit down we will go into this. I must insist." He pushed forward the big armchair from the fire, and, partly because she could indeed no longer stand, Horatia sank into it. "Now, tell me what you have been hearing in the milliner's?"
"What is the use," asked Horatia, "of being polite and considerate in private and humiliating me in public? I, your wife, have only to enter Herbault's to hear the whole story of your connection with Madame de Vigerie, from its beginning in Brittany this summer, under my eyes—to hear how you go to see her every day, how ... O, I don't know how I bore it!" She buried her face in her shaking hands.
Armand bent over her. "For Heaven's sake don't agitate yourself so, Horatia! Everybody is gossipped about in Paris, you must know that, surely! I give you my word of honour that it is false. I did not think you were the sort of woman to listen to such things."
"Nor did I think—once—that you were the sort of man to do them."
"I have not," said he steadily. "Madame de Vigerie is of a reputation as unsullied as you yourself."
Horatia smiled very bitterly. "Do you usually leave her house as early as you did this afternoon?"
"Not being in the habit of going there regularly, I have naturally no 'usual' hour for leaving," countered Armand.