"If you had been in love with me—" she chafed bitterly.
"On the morning some years ago when I came to you I made myself clear to the best of my ability," he said. "I did not mention love. I told you that I had no intention of marrying you. I called your attention to what the world would assume. I left the decision to you."
"What could I do—without a penny? Some other man would have had to do it if you had not," the letting go rushed her into saying.
"Or you would have been obliged to return to your parents in Jersey—which you refused to contemplate."
"Of course I refused. It would have been mad to do it. And there were other people who would have paid my bills."
"Solely because I knew that, I made my proposition. Being much older than you I realised that other people might not feel the responsibility binding—and permanent."
She sat up and stared at him. There was no touch of the rancour of recrimination in his presentation of detached facts. He was different from the rest. He was always better dressed and the perfection of his impersonal manner belonged to a world being swept away. He made Mr. Owen Delamore seem by contrast a bounder and an outsider. But the fact which had in the secret places of her small mind been the fly in her ointment—the one fact that he had never for a moment cared a straw for her—caused her actually to hate him as he again made it, quite without prejudice, crystal clear. It was true that he had more than kept his word—that he had never broken a convention in his bearing towards her—that in his rigid way he had behaved like a prince—but she had been dirt under his feet—she had been dirt under his feet! She wanted to rave like a fishwife—though there were no fishwives in Mayfair.
It was at this very moment of climax that a sudden memory beset her.
"Rob always said that if a woman who was pretty could see a man often enough—again and again—he couldn't help himself—unless there was some one else!"