He looked across at her, and his mother’s warnings came back to him. Claudia like her mother? Why, she had just naively acknowledged that she only wanted to be dominated by a strong man. Geoffrey Iverson had always been a slackster. A weak man makes a Circe. If a man cannot hold a woman, he deserves and must expect to lose her. Life to-day is not so far removed from savagery after all. The strong man always wins. And had he not won so far all along the line? Had he not taken and kept all that he needed? His mother did not understand that there was no cause to fear. A palmist had once told him that he possessed an indomitable will. He knew that she was right. His thoughts flew back, induced by the peace and quiet, to the last few years at the Bar. He had out-distanced all his rivals. Men who had eaten their dinners at the same time as he were still unknown, briefless. And some of them had shown brilliant promise, some of them had worked hard, too. He knew that already, although he was so young, there was a rumour that he might shortly be taking silk.
Claudia, her chin propped on the palm of her hand, had been watching him, and with a woman’s swift uncanny intuition she knew that he had ceased to think of her, that she had lost touch with him. With a touch of jealousy she cried:
“Gilbert, come back to me. Of what were you thinking?”
He came back at once, but without the faintest comprehension that she had felt left out in the cold, had divined that she had a serious rival.
“Suppose I say I was thinking of nothing in particular?”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be true. You were thinking of something that pleased you and—and interested you enormously. Your eyes were dark with thought, and there was a glint in them—— Ah! you were back in your chambers with your briefs?”
He laughed.
“Yes, I was right. You had deliberately left this sweet, sunny garden and—and me, and gone back to those stuffy chambers. We haven’t seen one another for four days, and you’d gone back to your work.”
There was an edge to her voice that roused him.