“But it’s just as well you should know.” She didn’t heed his gesture. “It’s just as well you should know that it’s easy for men to make love to me—‘easy, my dear, dead easy’! Why, Ivor, making love to me has become a recognised institution, it was the only careless game that the war didn’t make more expensive. I assure you. And not so very careless with some, either, for I’m still beautiful. D’you notice, Ivor, that I’m being funny, so that you can laugh? Poor Ivor.... Didn’t you know, dear, that Virginia at thirty-one is a perfect mess? You ought to have known, clever Ivor, you ought indeed—you who write so bravely about women, not to say courtesans!”
She had said just the things to make him angry. But he only lit another cigarette; he held the safety-match to the fire this time.
And she stamped her foot at him in a sudden fever. “Don’t you see, you fool, that I’ve never yet met a man in whom I haven’t brought out the beastliness? Never once—it’s my fault, I bring it out. Somehow....”
He was quite cold now.
“Virginia,” he said, “you’ve got nerves. And I’m not a cad—I don’t think so, anyway.” It was her scene entirely—he implied that. And he wanted to show that the whole thing rather bored him—her attitude.
“I know.” She nodded her head. “That’s why all this. For we wouldn’t suit each other at all, you and I. I’m no use to you, Ivor....”
And the sudden words on his lips were broken by her peculiar laugh.
“For where you are so wrong is,” she went on reasonably, “that you think I’m like you. But I’m nothing like you at all. I’m just a little cad....”
“My telling you all this,” she gravely assured him, “is entirely on your own head. You shouldn’t have kissed me—like that! It wasn’t fair, Ivor. And very upsetting.... Oh!...”
“You see, Ivor, I misbehave,” she explained. It was her air of being reasonable that irritated him most. “Yes, I do! I misbehave frightfully. People will tell you.... And where you are so wrong is that you think I’ve been natural when with you, whereas I’ve really been on my very best behaviour with you—all the time. Even now....”