She bit her lips for a second. Then her eyes flashed. She put her arms round his neck and drew him to her. "You shan't!" she said. "You shan't glide away from me like this."
Every nerve in his body began to tremble. His skin pricked and grew hot.
"What will you give?" he asked in a muffled voice.
"I? What I choose to give!" she replied. "Gillie, I'll do what I like with you."
She shrank back in the corner of the cab with a little cry. Lothian's face was red and blazing with anger.
"No names like that, Rita!" he said roughly. "You shan't call me that."
It was a despairing cry of drowning conscience, honour bleeding to death, dissolving dignity and manhood.
However much he might long for her: however strongly he was enchained, it was a blot, an indignity, an outrage, that this girl should call him by the familiar home name. That was Mary's name for him. Mrs. Gilbert Lothian alone had the right to say that.
Just then the taxi-metre stopped outside the big red erection in the Marylebone Road, an unusual and fantastic silhouette against the heavy sky.
They went in together, and there was a chill over them both. They felt, on this grey day, as people who have lived for pleasure, sensation, and have fed too long on honeycomb, must ever feel; the bitterness of the fruit with the fair red and yellow rind. Ashes were in their mouths, an acrid flavour within their souls.