She pushed her chair back against his knees: "Beg pardon, Miss Beaminster, afraid I jolted you——"
"Oh! Keep quiet! Keep quiet!"
Her whisper was so urgent, so packed with irritation that instantly there was, in the box, the deepest of silences.
She sat forward again, anger choking her: she could not recover any illusion. She hated him, hated him! The crowd came on with a whirl. Then there was that last moment when the old watchman cries to the genial moon and the silvered roofs.
Then the curtain fell.
Without a word, her face white, her hands still trembling, she rose to leave the box. She passed out into the passage and found that Roddy was by her side.
"I say, Miss Beaminster, I am most awfully sorry, most awfully. I hadn't any idea, really, that I was kickin' up that row. I could have hit myself."
She walked down the passage and he followed her. She was superb, she was indeed, with her head up, that neck, those hands, those flashing eyes. He had never seen anyone so fine. She ought always to be enraged. That instant decided him. She was the woman for a man to have for his own, someone who could look like someone at the head of your table, someone with the right blood in her veins, someone....
"I could beat myself," he said again.
"How dared you——" she broke out at last. They were, by good luck, alone in the passage. "How could you? What do you come for if you care nothing for music at all? If you can hear a voice like that and then talk about your own silly little affairs.... And the selfishness of it! Of course you think of nobody but yourself!"