It is not possible you--you didn't like it?--Page 287
She would have given worlds for the lie that would not come; her eyes shrank from his; the sincerity and conviction of his tone made deceit impossible. It was almost in a whisper that she answered: "Oh, Cyril, Cyril,--I'm afraid I didn't."
He pushed away his plate and got up; he could not suffer such a mortification sitting; the flat itself seemed too small to hold his sudden shame, his agitation, the staggering shock of what seemed to him his wife's disloyalty.
"What was the matter with it?" he demanded passionately. "What was it you did not like?--No, no, you needn't try to wriggle out of it; you've said too much to stop now; you've as good as told me it was damned bad, and I want to know why.--The words don't matter; it isn't a question of how you put it, nor how much I mind being knocked by the one person on earth--! My God, Phyllis, what do you mean by saying I was bad?"
She was terrified. No culprit in the dock ever trembled more guiltily, or faced a brow-beating prosecutor with so stricken a look. Her husband's bitter and contemptuous tone cut her like a lash. But it was too late now to make excuses, to palliate the offense. There was nothing for it but to go on--to justify herself--and the better she could do it the more she would wound him! And all this on a night that surely ought to have been their happiest.
"You made the captain too--too common," she stammered. "He is supposed to be a high-bred, aristocratic man--stupid, of course--but a gentleman through and through. In real life--"
"Oh, real life!" he interrupted roughly, "that's where all you ignorant, criticizing people go wrong. He has nothing to do with real life--he's a preposterous stage figure, a convention. I have to take what I'm given; I'm not the dramatist; I can't write new lines for him, can I? My business is to hide the strings that pull his arms and legs, and make him possible--and by George, I did it!"
"But Cyril, dearest, listen--even when you first come on you're not polite enough, not chivalrous enough. You almost burst out laughing at--"
"That's to give contrast to him afterwards."
"But you can do that, and still keep him a gen--I mean nice, and--"