"Stop putting that stuff on your face! You know I hate it."
Her only answer was to dab anew, and so thickly that the powder was strewn over the front of her dress and the floor. The clothes she had taken off were flung on a chair; as she brushed past them, they fell to the ground. She did not stoop to pick them up, but pushed them out of the way with her foot. Sitting down in the rocking-chair, she closed her eyes, and spread her arms out along the arms of the chair.
He could not see her from where he lay, but she was within reach of him, and, after a brief, unhappy silence, he put out his hand and drew the chair towards him, urging it forward, inch by inch, until it was beside the sofa. Then he pulled her head down, so that it also lay on the cushion, and he could feel her hair against his.
"How you hate me!" he said in a low voice, and as though he were speaking to himself. Laying her hand on his forehead, he made of it a screen for his eyes. "Who could have foreseen this!" he said again, in the same toneless way.
Louise lay still, and did not speak.
"Why do you stay with me?" he went on, looking out from under her hand. "I often ask myself that. For you're free to come and go as you choose."
Her eyes opened at this, though he did not see it. "And I choose to stay here! How often am I to tell you that? Why do you come back on it to-night? I'm tired—tired."
"I know you are. I saw it as soon as you came in. It's been a tiring day, and you probably ... walked too far."
With a jerk, she drew her hand out of his, and sat upright in her chair. Something, a mere tone, the slight pause, in his apparently harmless words, incensed her. "Too far, did I?—Oh, to-night at least, be honest! Why don't you ask me straight out where I have been?—and what I have done? Can't you, for once, be man enough to put an open question?"
"Nothing was further from my mind than to make implications. It's you who're so suspicious. Just as if you had a bad conscience—something really to conceal."