“Apology!” he laughed. “Why dwell on that? Besides you’re a little too prompt to be quite sincere.”
“Haven’t you any sense of humor, Phil?”
“No.”
“What a situation! You kiss me and I apologize for it! Laugh, Phil, laugh! Mrs. Grundy is shrieking with delight. O boy! What a silly thing you look!”
“Good night, Nina.”
“No, au revoir,” she corrected. “You know, Phil, you mustn’t insult me—not publicly, that is. You see you couldn’t force yourself into somebody else’s machine, when I’m going home alone in an empty one. Besides, it’s all arranged with Egerton.”
Gallatin smiled and shrugged. “Oh, of course,” he said, “you seem to have me at your mercy.”
“I’ll be very good though, Phil,” she said, moving toward the stairway, “and if you’re afraid of me, I’ll ask Egerton to be chaperon.” She laughed at him over her shoulder, and he had to confess that this was the humor which suited her best.
Gallatin went slowly toward his dressing-room, his lips compressed, his head bent, a prey to a terrible depression made up of fervid self-condemnation. He had been on the very verge of—that which he most dreaded. In his heart, too, was a dull resentment at Jane’s intolerance—an attitude he was forced to admit when he could think more clearly that he had now amply justified, not because Jane had been a witness of the incident upon the kitchen stairway, but because of the other thing. Slowly he began to realize that to a woman a kiss is a kiss, whether coolly implanted near the left ear, as his had been, or upon a more appropriate spot; and the distinction which, at the time of the occurrence, had been so clear to his mind, seemed now to be less impressive. Jane’s position was unreasonable, but quite tenable, and he now discovered that unless he threw Nina’s confidences into the breach, a defense hardly possible under the circumstances, the matter would be difficult to explain. And yet the act had been so harmless, his intention so innocent, that, weighed in the balance with his love for Jane, the incident seemed to him the merest triviality, with reference to which Jane should not have condemned him unheard. He heard her laugh as she went down the stairs, and the carelessness of that mirth cut him to the marrow. What right had she to be gay when she knew that he must be suffering?
He entered Nina’s limousine, very much sobered, with a wish somewhere hidden in his heart that for this night at least Nina had been in Jericho. If the lady in the machine divined his thought she gave not the least sign of it; for when they had left the Club, some time after the others, and were on their way to the city, she carelessly resumed.