“Right. You’re a bit of a responsibility, Joan.”
“Don’t, then,” she said shortly, and turned round to greet Huntley as though nothing had happened between them.
But she kept in the light and the crowd, and there was a constraint between them. “I want to talk to you more,” he said, “and when we can talk without some one standing on one’s toes all the time and listening hard. I wish you’d come to my flat and have tea with me one day. It’s still and cosy, and I could tell you all sorts of things—things I can’t tell you here.”
Joan’s dread of any appearance of timid virtue was overwhelming. And she was now blind with rage at Peter—why, she would have been at a loss to say. She wanted to behave outrageously with Huntley. But in Peter’s sight. This struck her as an altogether too extensive invitation.
“I’ve never noticed much restraint in your conversation,” she said.
“It’s the interruptions I don’t like,” he said.
“You get me no ice, you get me no lemonade,” she complained abruptly.
“That’s what my dear Aunt Adelaide used to call changing the subject.”
“It’s the cry of outraged nature.”
“But I saw you having an ice—not half an hour ago.”