And, suddenly, Ivor had an acute feeling that he was “up against” those two men, standing there in the doorway in all the conviction of middle years and vast experience. It was the silliest and absurdest feeling he had ever had, but he felt it acutely, and it made him suddenly look quite set and grim—and, of course, sulky. They were now in the far corner of the ballroom, away from the guardians of the door. And Magdalen Gray wondered at his abrupt stopping of the dance, away in the corner there, and at the way he looked down at her, so darkly sulky: the absurd young grimness of this stranger surprised her back into her gaiety.
“Oh, but you look like a man who has discovered something!” she laughed at him. “Picture of young gentleman as pirate on sighting fair merchantman....”
“I want very much,” Ivor said, “to see you again, Mrs. Gray.”
She liked him for refusing to be made ridiculous. It was most unusual in men....
“But aren’t you bullying me just a little bit—and so early in our acquaintance?” she asked quietly—keeping all the foolery in her words and none in her manner, as was her way. “But maybe that’s because you think it’s going to be difficult to see me?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking—and the previous thought to that was that you were worthwhile,” he dared to say. It was those sceptical-looking eyebrows that helped him to say things like that and look as though he had meant to say something else....
“But I’m just a little tired of being thought ‘worthwhile’!” she cried, with a surprisingly deep impatience.
“And I’d like, please, to be allowed to do the thinking first, just for a change....” And she passed a hand over her eyes and slightly pressed her fingers against her temples, as though to soothe the sickness of a headache.
He was nervously conscious that he had made a mistake. He couldn’t know that the mistake lay in his liking her at all, who was to-night surfeited with men’s likings.... The band had stopped, and they were walking now across the bare expanse of floor towards the door. The two men of middle years had but a second before left it, so obviously as though she were to come downstairs after them. And Ivor’s eyes involuntarily followed them through the doorway.
“All the same——” he began sulkily.