“So that now,” she retorted with a little bitter humour, “what you’ve got to do is to give Katya a good time and go on waiting for me.”
“Till when?” he said with a sudden hot eagerness.
“Oh,” she said, “till all the ships that ever sailed come home; till all the wild-oats that were ever sown are reaped; till the sun sets in the east and the ice on the poles is all melted away. If you were the only man in all the world, my dear, I would never look at you again.”
Grimshaw looked at the ground and muttered aimlessly:
“What’s to be done? What’s to be done?”
He went on repeating this like a man stupified beyond the power of speech and thought, until at last it was as if a minute change of light passed across the figure of Pauline Leicester—as if the softness faded out of her face, her colour and her voice, as if, having for that short interval revealed the depths of her being, she had closed in again, finally and irrevocably. So that it was with a sort of ironic and business-like crispness that she said:
“All that’s to be done is the one thing that you’ve got to do.”
“And that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.
“That is to find the man who rang up that number. You’ve got to do that because you know all about these things.”
“I?” Robert Grimshaw said desolately. “Oh yes, I know all about these things.”