"You've been misinformed," she retorted coldly. "Not about the clothes. I do loathe them. But I've no intention of forming a free alliance with anybody. Certainly not with Monsieur St. Hilaire. Why should I? I don't love him. But I don't mind telling you that he has asked me to marry him."
"Oh, then, that's what you're considering?"
"Yes," she said concisely.
And "put that in your pipe and smoke it," added a defiant glance from her half-parted long-lashed eyes.
If he had any notion of playing the medieval knight, plunging through fire and water for the damsel in distress, she would spoil that chivalrous pose in a jiffy.
"Janet, I don't understand you," he said, with quite unnecessary vehemence. "You said you wouldn't marry Claude, your reason being that you loved him. Now you say you will marry Monsieur St. Hilaire, and your reason is that you don't love him."
His eyes added: "You are inexplicable, exasperating, maddening—and yet adorable: in short, you are Janet."
The bus came to a full stop, and a few minutes later they were in the concert hall.
V
The concert was one of a special series given by an orchestra from Rouen. Janet's attention had been drawn to the series by two circumstances. One was that a third of the members of the orchestra were women. The other was that the inclusion of women in a first-class orchestra had plunged musical circles into a controversy which the newspapers eagerly seized upon and played up with caricature or abuse, satire or eulogy, according to the partisanship, but never the merits of the case.