Anna gave him a reproachful glance. “Not the fact that I am?” she reminded him; but even this only stiffened his resistance.
“Why should you be, either—to this extent?”
The question made her pause. She glanced about the hall, as if to be sure they had it to themselves; and then, in a lowered voice: “I don’t know,” she suddenly confessed; “but, somehow, if they’re not happy I feel as if we shouldn’t be.”
“Oh, well—” Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforce yields to so lovely an unreasonableness. Escape was, after all, impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame de Chantelle’s door.
Within, among the bric-a-brac and furbelows, he found Miss Painter seated in a redundant purple armchair with the incongruous air of a horseman bestriding a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite, still a little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and clasping the handkerchief whose visibility symbolized her distress. On the young man’s entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which she immediately appended: “Mr. Darrow, I can’t help feeling that at heart you’re with me!”
The directness of the challenge made it easier for Darrow to protest, and he reiterated his inability to give an opinion on either side.
“But Anna declares you have—on hers!”
He could not restrain a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed to attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He had certainly promised her his help—but before he knew what he was promising.
He met Madame de Chantelle’s appeal by replying: “If there were anything I could possibly say I should want it to be in Miss Viner’s favour.”
“You’d want it to be—yes! But could you make it so?”