"Butter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off."
She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that the operation gave her all the time she wanted.
"I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she.
He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as positively illuminating their end of the room.
"You're not? Well, prove it."
"Is it possible to prove anything to you?"
Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.
"You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else—they're all looking at you—by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to look a little less as if we compromised each other."
He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove his independence before Lady Cayley. He had longed to get away from the woman, to stand by his wife's side—to take her out of the room, out of the house, into the open air. And now the perversity that was in him kept him where he hated to be.
"That's right. Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind."