But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John's Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing to shreds.
There couldn't be anything in it.
He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall lean body in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie. He could see his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high, close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.
There couldn't be anything in it.
Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.
And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with her?"
He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask himself that question.
He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He wondered what other men did. It never occurred to him that at twenty-two he was young to be considering this problem.
He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got to the bottom. Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there would be nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look an awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you." Perhaps Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've finished all we had to say." And he would walk out and leave them there. Not caring.
He wondered if he would look an awful ass doing it.