“What can I say to that?” he asked with half-amused embarrassment. “We’re pretty egotistical, but one can’t go back on Whitman.”
“No,” she laughed mischievously; “I think you’re loyal; and there are situations from which it’s difficult to extricate oneself. Didn’t you find it so, for example, when you declined to come here with Nasmyth, because Miss Crestwick had pressed you to go to Marple’s?”
He could think of no neat reply to this and the obvious fact pleased her, for she guessed that he would rather have spent the evening with her. This was true, for now, sitting in the quiet garden in her company, he looked back on the entertainment with something like disgust. Marple’s male friends were, for the most part, characterized by a certain grossness and sensuality; in their amusements at games of chance one or two had displayed an open avarice. These things jarred on the man who had toiled among the rocks and woods, where he had practised a stringent self-denial.
“I heard that you figured in a striking little scene,” Millicent went on.
“I couldn’t help it.” Lisle appeared annoyed. “That man Batley irritated me; though, after all, I don’t blame him the most.”
This was a slip.
“Whom do you blame?” she asked sharply.
“Oh,” he explained, “I wasn’t the only person, present, and I hadn’t arrived at the beginning. Somebody should have stopped the fellow; the shares he tried to work off on Crestwick were no good.”
“Then Batley wanted to sell that silly lad some worthless shares—and there were other people looking on?”
He would not tell her that Gladwyne had watched the proceedings, to some extent acquiescing.