Claudia’s lips curved into a smile, a smile that puzzled him. It was a smile, the lips had even parted, showing her rather small white teeth, but he felt that it was the wrong kind of smile. It seemed to have an edge to it somehow. He wondered if he had put his foot in it as he watched her ascend in the lift. Gilbert had told him that he had “got out of a stupid dinner-party ... a woman likes those sort of things ... her province, you know....” Fritz Neeburg was a bachelor and knew little of women, either by experience or temperament, but he realized that it was not a real smile of genuine amusement. He felt vaguely that it was like the early bloom of a peach which masks the hidden acidity. Then he recalled that Claudia lately had not been half so gay and spontaneously happy as in the early months of her marriage.
Gilbert came out of the study at the sound of her entrance. She saw at once that he was in a good temper and unusually genial. He was in the humour to stay up a little longer and chat, for he had just worsted Fritz in an argument over the Home Rule Bill, and Gilbert always liked to hold his own, even on his own hearthrug.
“Hallo, Claudia! you’re back then. There’s a nice fire in here. Pretty cold outside, isn’t it?”
She followed him into the library without any reply, but he did not notice her silence, nor did he look at her, except casually. He was a man who would buy a beautiful picture, look admiringly at it once, hang it on his walls and then never notice it again.
A big leather chair invited her to sit down, but she stood by the oaken mantelpiece. Gilbert had commenced to put away several reference books that he had got out to convince Neeburg, for Gilbert was always great on figures and statistics.
“Tough fighter, old Fritz, but of course you can’t expect a German, even if he has lived over here all his life, to understand English politics. Of course, he knows his own subjects and——”
“Gilbert, you and Neeburg dined together to-night?”
“Yes,” he said, faintly surprised. “Did you see him?” For the moment he had forgotten his broken engagement with the Rivingtons. He had a wonderful habit, which had helped to make him what he was, of settling a point and then automatically forgetting all about it. Then his wife’s toilette caught his eye and he remembered. Where had Claudia been? Oh, yes! “It would have been an awful rush to have got back in time to dress and go out to Hampstead, and I didn’t feel a bit like it. How is the old General?”
His back was towards her, busy with the bookcase. She looked at it coldly, critically.