“You could have got away quite easily to-night. I’m not a fool, Gilbert, don’t underrate my intelligence. If you had said to me in the first place, ‘Tell the Rivingtons we are engaged for that day,’ and then spent the evening quietly at home with me, I should have been perfectly content. But I will not be used.”
“My dear girl——”
Perhaps there is nothing an angry woman dislikes more at certain stages of an argument than that preface.
“Couldn’t you even have come out to fetch me?” she went on. “You see hardly anything of me, and we might have had a good talk on the way home. Don’t you want to see anything of me?”
“Why of course. Come, Claudia, do be reasonable. We are having a talk now, and it might be a pleasant one, if you are not so fiery. You are always getting so excited over things.”
“I came home early because——” She remembered the impulse that had made her leave the company, and she laughed. Love? Was love this cold, indifferent, methodical thing? Was she to be content with this tantalizing imitation? Her eyes flashed defiantly and she flung back her head. Picking up a cigarette out of the box, she sat down and lighted it. Her excitement had suddenly evaporated in that laugh like an exhaust-valve relieving steam pressure. It was the rather critical repressed woman of the world who next spoke to him.
“We don’t see much of one another nowadays, do we?” she said, looking at him through the smoke.
“Later on I shall have more time, I hope,” he replied, placidly accepting her cessation of unreasonableness. He never worried over women’s moods. If you left them alone, he argued, they evaporated.
“Later on, we shall both be middle-aged,” said Claudia calmly. “Later on the gods will jeer at us and ask us what we have done with our youth. They always ask that question sooner or later of everyone. They always bring you to account, and sometimes the balance is on one side and sometimes on the other. I wonder how you and I will be able to answer that question?”
“Oh! I’m not going to get old yet,” he smiled. “Anyone would think we were on the verge of decrepitude.”