'I was a good deal cut up myself,' he observed coolly. 'Here's your book, Madame Cordova.'
'No,' Margaret answered with a little burst of indignation, 'I don't want it. I won't take it from you!'
'What's the matter now?' asked Mr. Van Torp without the least change of manner. 'It's your friend Mr. Lushington's latest, you know, and it won't be out for ten days. I thought you would like to see it, so I got an advance copy before it was published.'
He held the volume out to her, but she would not even look at it, nor answer him.
'How you hate me! Don't you, Madame Cordova?'
Margaret still said nothing. She was considering how she could best get rid of him. If she simply brushed past him and went back to her chair on the lee side, he would follow her and go on talking to her as if nothing had happened; and she knew that in that case she would lose control of herself before Griggs and Miss More.
'Oh, well,' he went on, 'if you don't want the book, I don't. I can't read novels myself, and I daresay it's trash anyhow.'
Thereupon, with a quick movement of his arm and hand, he sent Mr. Lushington's latest novel flying over the lee rail, fully thirty feet away, and it dropped out of sight into the grey waves. He had been a good baseball pitcher in his youth.
Margaret bit her lip and her eyes flashed.
'You are quite the most disgustingly brutal person I ever met,' she said, no longer able to keep down her anger.