He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his face.
“But I don’t care,” she said, gathering resolution, and secretly calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to whether she was there in her place of concealment. “I don’t care. I can’t change my nature because of that. And surely—surely there must be some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to—”
“Ulford, eh?” he interrupted.
The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme’s temper. She forgot the believers in the angel and the angel too.
“How dare you?” she exclaimed. “As if I—”
He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage returning.
“Good women don’t do things like that,” he said. “If it was known in London you’d be done for.”
“And you—may you do what you like openly, brazenly?”
“Men’s different,” he said.
The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch, and her sense of impotent fury was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that men should be “different,” or at least—if not that—had smilingly given them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever, almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him. An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.