"I don't know and I don't care," said Ted, savagely.
Surely it was not in the power of that harmless person, the editor of the "Sunday Illustrated," to move him so? Something must have happened.
What had happened was this. As Ted was going into the little brown house at Chelsea he had met Mr. Langley Wyndham coming out of it; and for the first time in his life he had found Audrey in a bad temper. She was annoyed, in the first place, because the novelist had been unable to stay to tea. She had provided a chocolate cake on purpose, the eminent man having once approved of that delicacy. (It was a pretty way Audrey had, this remembering the likings of her friends.) She was also annoyed because Ted's coming had followed so immediately on Wyndham's going. It was her habit now, whenever she had seen Wyndham, to pass from the reality of his presence into a reverie which revived the sense of it, and Ted's arrival had interfered with this pastime. The first thing the boy did, too, was to wound her tenderest susceptibilities. He began playing with the books that lay beside her.
"What a literary cat it is!"
She frowned and drew in her breath quickly, as if in pain. He went on turning over the pages—it was Wyndham's "London Legends"—with irreverent fingers.
"I should very much like to know——" said Audrey to Ted, and stopped short.
"What would you very much like to know, Puss?"
"What you saw in me, to begin with."
"I haven't the remotest idea—unless it was your intellect."
"I should also like to know," said Audrey to the teapot, "why people fall in love?"