Paula was giving a large—but not too large—dinner on the second night. She was very animated about it, excited, gay. “They say,” she told Dirk, “that Goguet doesn’t eat anything but hard-boiled eggs and rusks. Oh, well, the others won’t object to squabs and mushrooms and things. And his hobby is his farm in Brittany. Pool’s stunning—dark and sombre and very white teeth.”
Paula was very gay these days. Too gay. It seemed to Dirk that her nervous energy was inexhaustible—and exhausting. Dirk refused to admit to himself how irked he was by the sallow heart-shaped exquisite face, the lean brown clutching fingers, the air of ownership. He had begun to dislike things about her as an unfaithful spouse is irritated by quite innocent mannerisms of his unconscious mate. She scuffed her heels a little when she walked, for example. It maddened him. She had a way of biting the rough skin around her carefully tended nails when she was nervous. “Don’t do that!” he said.
Dallas never irritated him. She rested him, he told himself. He would arm himself against her, but one minute after meeting her he would sink gratefully and resistlessly into her quiet depths. Sometimes he thought all this was an assumed manner in her.
“This calm of your—this effortlessness,” he said to her one day, “is a pose, isn’t it?” Anything to get her notice.
“Partly,” Dallas had replied, amiably. “It’s a nice pose though, don’t you think?”
What are you going to do with a girl like that!
Here was the woman who could hold him entirely, and who never held out a finger to hold him. He tore at the smooth wall of her indifference, though he only cut and bruised his own hands in doing it.
“Is it because I’m a successful business man that you don’t like me?”
“But I do like you.”
“That you don’t find me attractive, then.”