“Double be——”
“You must tell me about that woman,” she broke in, smiling falsely, her teeth, beneath her curled-back lips, white and cruel in their regularity and soundness. “You’ve committed yourself. Who was she? A business connection—a person from—Liverpool? Though you’ve never asserted that it was politic for you to keep in with the women—as it is for me to appease the men.”
He pushed her away from him by a reckless blow on the chest.
“Curse you!” he said with fury. “You’re like a cat—all claws, all purr. You double like a cat. I saw one chased by a dog through some front gardens the other day. She doubled behind some shrubs, and he lost her.”
She had one hand on her chest, where it throbbed with his fist. She was smiling still; a demoniacal smile, but with the most hopeless outraged tenderness behind it.
“There are no front gardens in Piccadilly,” she said, looking at him oddly. “You must have been in the suburbs.”
He sat down. He was biting his nails fitfully, and looking up at her from time to time with a sullen, suspicious glance.
“I’ll be even with you yet,” he said threateningly. “You were there.”
“I wasn’t.”