“What does that mean?” laboriously from Winifred.
“Look next time there’s a fried whiting on your plate. Yes—two of us, Deb—we’ve been meaning to pitch into you since some time, Antonia and I. What are you doing with Blair Stevenson?”
“What’s Blair Stevenson doing with you?” Antonia amended.
Their victim protested. “I could tell you better if you wouldn’t both hover over me in that menacing way. Do, please, go back to your seats. Pair of bullies!”
They humoured her in that, but Deb saw there was no escape from their quiet persistence of enquiry.
“Did I tell you about a man in the train——” she began.
“We were asking you about Blair Stevenson, Deb.”
“Yes, but the man in the train bears on the question—he does, honestly. And I’m sure Winnie would like to hear about him—it raises an interesting point of etiquette, ... Well, once upon a time,” in a great hurry, for she saw that Antonia and Gillian would immediately blockade any gap she exposed to them—“I was travelling, and there were lots of people in the carriage, and one quite nice-looking man, and presently all the other people got out, and we both had a sort of feeling of release ... at least, I had, and I knew he had too. He asked if I minded whether he smoked, and I said I didn’t a bit, so he offered me a cigarette, and I took it and thanked him nicely. Well, it would have been so ridiculous to have glared at him and been porcupiny all over, and to have sat there consciously and conspicuously hugging my virtue as though I suspected from the very first moment that he had designs upon it. I made some remark about having to hurry with the cigarette as I got out at the next station—‘Oh, then we haven’t got very much time, have we?’”
Deb broke off. Her hands were hotly clenched, and her eyes a sombre, crepuscular blue....
“Jill—I fought for it like a—a—devil-cat, for what I had—God knows why—but I had guarded it by flight and by cunning and by instinct, for years and years—since the very beginning.... And now this perfectly casual stranger takes it for granted it was his for the asking. I was up against it—and I fought—so that he was astonished—let me go. I walked to the other end of the carriage and sat there, looking out. Presently he said in a different way altogether—not ashamed of himself and perfectly cool, but different: ‘You can come back to your seat opposite me. It’s all right.’ It was all right, and I came back and said slowly: ‘Not exactly playing the game, was it?’ You see, he was sure to have been a public-school boy, and if he had winced, I’d have gone on to say something about how would he like it if his sister....”