“Well, you can say what you like, Antonia, but though I was very angry with Pinto for the moment, I do honestly think he was perfectly right—in his own way. And I must say, I do like a man to assert himself. I mean, it’s a sort of test, isn’t it, Gillian, how much he really respects you, if it annoys him to find your room full of other men? especially—but that was what I was going to tell you.” She unpinned the veil from her slanting sailor hat and adjusted the belt of her trim jacket ... pulled forward a kiss-curl or two, dumped Quelle Vie into Nell’s lap, whipped out some lurid red lip-salve and delicately outlined the curves of her mouth, and spun a provocative glance downwards at her flaunted silk ankles, as though they were another’s, and she coveted them.
“Never mind all that, Zoe—Theo won’t be in for ages. Tell us your news first.”
Zoe opened her eyes. “Well, I must say, Jill, it’s not like you to be spiteful. No, it isn’t, and I’m disappointed. If Deb had made that remark, I wouldn’t have been....”
“Thanks,” from a drowsy but grateful Deb on the divan. While Gillian, in whose wide frankness had lurked not a germ of spite, gazed helplessly at the ruffled little soubrette; and then, suddenly understanding, apologized.
Zoe kissed her. “All right, dear. ‘The mind knoweth not its own cattiness.’ Well, about Pinto——”
She described at length how a very contrite Pinto had yesterday turned up at the flat, tendering his usual olive-branch—a jar of olives—with the explanation of the occasion when he had overheard, in a café in Paris, two subalterns discussing his fiancée by name, over a letter presumably from Cliffe, containing the advice to think about her no more, for she was being kept by a man with the face of an orang-outang and the temper of a Patagonian savage....
“And I do think it’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard, don’t you, Antonia?—that the poor darling never recognized himself, but thought I was being untrue to him with another man while he was away. Yes, I really do think it justifies his annoyance that time.... I like a man to have a spirit of his own, whatever you may say. And now he’s at last had it out with Cliffe, and we’re engaged again, and I’ve promised him all sorts of things, I forget what——”
“I’d try and remember, if I were you. One of them might be important.”
“Deb, you’ve got a perfectly horrid mind.... I’ve promised him, of course, not to answer advertisements in the “Vie Parisienne,” nor to accept wine—little things like that. And I think he’s right, in a way, don’t you?—because one never knows what may happen—though I do think Cliffe ought to think twice before he gossips about being ‘kept,’ because it’s not a nice thing to say about one’s friends, is it? I wonder if I shall ever meet those two subalterns—wouldn’t you say they must have seen me somehow, and been rather smitten, for Cliffe to write like that and warn them off? But it was a funny coincidence, wasn’t it, that Pinto should just have been sitting at the same time in the same café, so near their table? And I believe, though he didn’t say so, that one of them was that perfectly dear lamb, Timothy Fawcett.”
Antonia, to spare Nell’s obvious confusion, asked: “Are you going to marry Pinto at last?”