"Mr. Massel, this is Adolf Mendel, the violinist! My fiancé," she added with a note of deferential pride.
Her fiancé ... then she'd ... her fiancé...!
The blustering, big-boned lout, what the devil did he mean by taking everything for granted in this gruff cocksure way! Had he ever sat with her in the angle of a barn and a haystack, kissing like hell! Had her eyelashes ever ... and her lips...
And she there, the vampire, what did she mean by it! Oh, blast her and the whole empty-headed crowd of them with their Red Roses and squeaky violins!
Anyhow, thank God, it was over! She'd pricked the bubble of his insufferably stupid illusion! In her degree and kind she'd gone the way of all the rest—Edie, Alec, Harry! What an idiotic room it was, with its refined knick-knacks on the mantelpiece and that creature with her hair up and the red-plush-framed photograph of Blackpool on the piano! They were discussing music and songs with a wealth of ostentatious esoteric detail. That was obvious enough surely. They wanted him to clear. He rose to go. Mamie perceived it with alacrity from the corner of her eye.
"Oh, I'm so sorry you've got to go!" she said effusively. "And I'm awfully sorry about that too, you know! You will come round again? Shan't he, Adolf, you'd love to see Mr. Massel again! Not at all, not at all; oh, good night!"
On the other side of the door he remembered his translation of Dante.
"Blast Dante!" he exclaimed through his teeth.
It was the fit of profound misogyny which followed this entirely unsatisfactory incident that fitted him so completely for the effusiveness and glitter of Wilfrid Strauss, and for that interlude with Kate which, only too conventional in its mere detail, was nevertheless at once the end and the beginning of Philip Massel's boyhood.