"Before this?" She tapped her foot, impatient at the slow movement of his thought. "Up there in the hotel?"
"Oh, in the hotel. I suppose it was seeing you with——"
It was positively terrible, the look with which she faced him now. But his idea was that he had got to help her (hadn't she helped him?), and he was going through with it. It was permissible; it was even imperative, seeing the lengths, the depths, rather, of intimacy that they had gone to.
"Those two," he said. "They don't seem exactly your sort."
"You mean," said she, "they are not exactly yours."
She felt the shudder of his unspoken "Heaven forbid!"
"I suppose," she continued, "if a European man sees any woman alone in [a] hotel with two men whom he can't size up right away as her blood relations, he's apt to think things. Well, for all you know, Mr. Tarbuck might be my uncle and Mr. Bingham-Booker my half-brother."
"But they aren't."
"No. As far as blood goes, they aren't any more to me than Adam. You have me there."
There was a long pause which Thesiger, for the life of him, could not fill.