"If Nadine wishes—" she began.
"It does not matter what Nadine wishes. Nadine, please tell her to go."
Seymour spoke quite quietly, and having spoken he turned aside and lit a cigarette he held in his hand. By the time he had finished doing that the door had closed behind Esther. He looked round.
"What a charming room!" he said. "But if you are going to sit in a room like this, you ought to dress for it."
Nadine felt that all the sorrow she had been conscious of for him was being squeezed out of her. He tiptoed about, now looking at a picture, and now fingering an embroidery. He stopped for a moment opposite a Louis Seize tapestry chair, and gently flicked off it the cigarette ash that he had let drop there. He looked at the faded crimson of the Spanish silk on the walls, and examined with extreme care a Dutch picture of a frozen canal with peasants skating, that hung above the mantelpiece. There was an Aubonne carpet on the floor, and after one glance at it he went softly off it, and stood on the hearth-rug.
"I should put three-quarters of this room into a museum," he said, "and the rest into a dust-bin. You are going to ask me what I should put into the dust-bin. I should put that sham Watteau picture there, and that bureau that thinks it is Jacobean."
"And me?" asked Nadine.
"I am not sure. No: I am sure. I don't put you anywhere. I want to know where you put yourself. Perhaps you think you don't owe me an explanation. But I disagree with you. I think you owe it me. Of course I know you haven't got an explanation. But I should like to hear your idea of one."
Standing on the hearth-rug he pointed his toe as he spoke, looking at the well-polished shoe that shod it. Nadine was just on the point of telling him that he was thinking not about her, but about his shoe, but he was too quick for her.
"Of course I'm thinking about my shoe," he said. "I was wondering how it is that Antoinette polishes shoes better than any one in the world."