“Did you talk?”
“I tried to make her talk,” said Martyn frankly, “but, by Jove, she’s a baffling woman. D’you remember how she turned down Leeds on the day of the picnic? I can quite understand it, of course, but I’m sorry for him, especially as she’d apparently been on quite the opposite tack when they met before. Well, she was just about as forthcoming with me to-day as she was with old Leeds when he would keep on with variations of that story about the cocktails.
“I asked her if she thought the play was shaping all right, and she said, ‘I really couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ and all the time one felt that she was so tremendously on the defensive.”
“I’ve had that feeling about her myself,” Sallie remarked, “as though life had used her pretty hard, which I daresay it has—through her own fault, too. Go on.”
“Well, not having made any headway at all, I was just going to start on Cairo and the East generally when there was a ring at the door, and Mrs. Harter jumped as though she’d been shot. It’s my belief she thought it was Bill Patch, come to fetch her, but she went on with her ironing and I heard someone else go to the door—the woman of the house, I suppose. And almost directly the dining room door opened and a man walked in, and Mrs. Harter looked up and saw him.”
Martyn paused like an actor who wants to enhance a coming effect.
“How did he strike you?” said Sallie breathlessly.
It was characteristic of her that even in her excitement she should put it like that instead of saying, as almost everybody else would have said, “What’s he like?”
“Reptilian—distinctly reptilian. His eyes were too close together and his nostrils flat and too small. But it wasn’t only that. I should say that in a quiet way he was ruthless—very ruthless. I didn’t like the look of him—and neither did Mrs. Harter for the matter of that. When she saw him she stared at him, and something in the way she did it made me guess who it was—just like that. She never said a word, but after a bit he said: ‘Hallo, Diamond! I thought I’d take you by surprise. We got in to Plymouth this morning.’”
“I got up to go, of course, from sheer decency, although I wanted frightfully to sit it out, and I was morally certain that neither of them had given me a thought. But I was wrong. Harter said to her, ‘Who’s your friend, Di? Aren’t you going to introduce me?’”