She leaned slowly back in her chair, and met his eyes. "I am quite willing to be friends," she said. "But--now that I am married--you mustn't try to flirt with me. I detest married women's flirtations."
He made a wry grimace. "My precious prude, you don't even know the meaning of the word. Did you ever flirt with anyone in all your pure, sweet life? The bare idea is ludicrous."
Maud's eyes held his with severity. "No, I never flirted with you, Charlie," she said. "But I gave you privileges which I can never give again, which you must never again expect of me. Is that quite clear?"
He stooped towards her, his hands upon her shoulders; his dark face deeply glowing. "O Maud, the sincere!" he said, in a voice that vibrated with an odd intensity, half-fierce, half-feigned. "Dare you look me in the face and tell me that in marrying you have not done violence to your soul?"
She looked him in the face with absolute steadiness. "I have nothing whatever to tell you," she said.
He released as suddenly as he had taken her. "There is no need," he said. "I can read you like a book. I know that if I had been at hand when your mother brought you down here--as heaven knows I would have been if I had known--if I had guessed--you would have been ready enough to marry even me." He stopped, and over his ugly, comic face there came a strangely tragic look. "You could have dictated your own terms too," he said. "I'm not hard to please."
"Charlie, hush!" Sharply she broke in upon him. "That is a forbidden subject. I told you definitely long ago that I could never marry you. You know as well as I do that it wouldn't have answered. You would have tired very quickly of my prim ways--just as you did tire in the old days when you fancied you cared for me. I couldn't have satisfied you. I am not the kind of woman you crave for."
"No?" He laughed whimsically. "Yet, you know, you are unjust to me--always were. I don't know that you can help it, being what you are. But--if it had been my good luck to marry you--I would have been faithful to you. It's in my bones to be faithful to one woman. However, since she is denied me--" he snapped his fingers with an airy gesture--"je m'amuse autrement. By the way, are you coming up to lunch at the Castle on Sunday?"
"I?" She raised her brows momentarily. "No, I don't think so," she said.
"What! You won't? Jake's coming."