"Why strange, Philip?"
"Because you talk of love as Lawrence might."
She winced. "He would know," she said. "He does know, perhaps." She was talking to herself, and her voice was pathetic.
Philip's eyes grew fierce with anger. "What do you mean?"
"Not what your very ideal mind thinks," she said coldly.
He flamed scarlet, and looked away. "Claire," he said softly, "will you never have done stirring up suspicions no man could avoid, and then condemning them?"
"I didn't stir them up," she mocked.
"Who did, then?"
Claire was undergoing a developing reconstruction, but that she did not know. She thought she was degenerating, and the immediate result was to make her careless and ironical.
"Oh, the devil, perhaps," she hazarded.