"No, I'd no intention of going. I detest first nights," he answered.
"Then why were you there? Oh, I don't believe it—I don't believe it! You simply wanted to spend the evening with Adrienne; that was why you refused to go with me."
"Diana!" Max spoke incredulously. "You can't believe—you can't think that!"
"But I do think that!"—imperiously. "What else can I think?" Her long-pent jealousy had broken forth at last, and the words raced from her lips. "You refused to come when I asked you—offered me Jerry as an escort instead. Jerry!"—scornfully—"I'm to be content with my husband's secretary, I suppose, so that my husband himself can dance attendance on Adrienne de Gervais?"
Max stood motionless, his eyes like steel.
"You are being—rather childish," he said at last, with slow deliberation. His cool, contemptuous tones cut like a whip.
She had been rapidly losing her self-command, and, reading the intense anger beneath his outward calm, she made an effort to pull herself together.
"Childish?" she retorted. "Yes, I suppose it is childish to mind being deceived. I ought to have been prepared for it—expected it."
At the note of suffering in her voice the anger died swiftly out of his eyes.
"You don't mean that, Diana," he said, more gently.