He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other almost like a great boy.
“I don’t know what she’s up to,” he answered at last.
“Miss Schley?”
“Ah!”
Lady Holme felt her heart beat faster. Was her husband going to open up a discussion of the thing that had been turning her life to gall during these last weeks—his flirtation, his liaison—if it were a liaison; she did not know—with the American? The woman who had begun to idealise Fritz and the woman who was desperately jealous of him both seemed to be quivering within her.
“Do you mean—?” she began.
She stopped, then spoke again in a quiet voice.
“Do you mean that you think Miss Schley is going to do something unusual at the concert tomorrow?”
“I dunno. She’s the devil.”
There was a reluctant admiration in his voice, as there always is in the voice of a man when he describes a woman as gifted with infernal attributes, and this sound stung Lady Holme. It seemed to set that angel upon whom she was calling in the dust, to make of that angel a puppet, an impotent, even a contemptible thing.