"Of course. My father always ate by himself, and Hester, too. Caliban will never let anyone see him eat: I have often tried, but he hides himself."
The waiter brought them at this point an ivory-white salad of endive set with ruby points of beet, drenched in pure olive-oil, and of this soothing luxury Margarita consumed two large plates in dreamy silence.
"I like this food," she remarked at last, "I like it better than Hester's."
Roger grew literally warm with satisfaction. He was still smiling when she spooned out a great mouthful of the delicate ice before her and under his amazed eyes set her teeth in it.
The horror of that humiliating scene woke him, years afterward, through more than one clammy midnight. In one second the peaceful dining-room was a chattering, howling reign of terror. For Margarita, with a choking cry of rage and anguish, threw the ice with terrible precision into the bland face of the waiter who had brought it; threw her glass of water with an equal accuracy into the wide-open eyes of the head waiter, who appeared instantly; threw Roger's wine-glass full into his own horrified face as he rose to catch her death-dealing hand, and lifting with the magnificent single-armed sweep of a Greek war-goddess her chair from behind her, stood facing them, glaring silently, a slate-eyed Pallas gloriously at bay!
The red wine poured down Roger's face like blood; the force of the blow nearly stunned him, but by a supreme effort he bit furiously at his tongue and the pain steadied him. As he swept the table over with a crash and wrenched the chair from her hand (and he took his strength for it) he became aware that the angry excitement behind his back, the threatening babel, had subsided to long-drawn sighs of pity, and realised with a sort of disgusted relief that the blow he had himself suffered from this panting, writhing mænad had somehow changed the situation and that he was an object of horrified sympathy. Mercifully, the room was scantily filled, for it was early, and his curt explanation was accepted in respectful silence.
"Mademoiselle is—is not responsible for her act, I beg you to believe," he said grimly, white with humiliation and pain. "I beg you will accept ..."
The two waiters pocketed a week's earnings in voluble deprecation, the proprietor shrugged his excitement away into an admirable regret, the diners wrenched their eyes from Margarita's face and affected to see nothing as Roger buttoned her cheapish vague-coloured jacket around her and ordered her sternly to straighten her hat. Her fingers literally trembled with rage, her soft, round breasts, strangely distinct in outline to his fingers as he strained the tight jacket over them, rose and fell stormily; in a troubled flash of memory he seemed to be handling some throbbing, shot bird. His own clumsiness and strange, heady elation he attributed to the shock of the wine in his face.
In an incredibly short time the table was upright, the débris removed, the room, except for the indefinable, electric sense of recent tragedy that hovers over such scenes, much as it had been. Roger had carried, fortunately for him, a light overcoat on his arm, and this would hide his white, stained triangle of vest with a little management. Grasping Margarita by the arm he led her out of the room, and for the first time questioned her.
"Are you mad?" he muttered. "What do you mean by such a performance?"