"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.
"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.
"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the crowd on some other man's arm.
"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.
That meeting on the stairs!—he made a grievance of it, an injury. The earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging assertion of power and predominance.
"I shall act," Raymond declared.
"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."
"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a strong man always finds necessary.