"Ah, there I disagree," he said at length. "It would have made all the difference in the world. First of all you'd have proved that you were the sort of person one can go tiger-shooting with—it wasn't a particularly proud thing to do, was it?—and then you'd have proved to yourself that you'd got the moral courage to refuse a cheap surrender; and you'd have learned that eccentric amusements have to be paid for at blackmailing prices: you could go into court with an easy conscience, if you'd been having tea at Rumpelmayer's and the girl had died there. In the next place——"
Lady Barbara turned her head slowly and succeeded in stopping him without saying a word.
"I should be careful, if I were you, Mr. Waring," she recommended, as he paused.
"My dear Lady Barbara, you introduced the subject. You can't have all the fun of posing as a candidate for sympathy.... If you'd stayed, it would have changed your whole life. There would have been such an outcry that you'd have been broken; people simply wouldn't meet you. Not only Loring House would be closed to you——"
A coffee-spoon rattled onto the floor, as she turned on him again.
"I won't be spoken to like this!"
"It may come yet, of course," Jack went on reflectively, hardly noticing her furious interruption. "These things always do get out——"
"Are you trying to frighten me?" she asked. But she was frightened long before he entered the house. This was the kind of mishap to bring her months of ill luck....
Jack was angry without shewing it or guessing the reason. The young actress's death shocked him less than Lady Barbara's easy acceptance of it. To her and to Sonia Dainton, to Erckmann and the baroness, to Webster and Pennington, the dead girl was a nonentity from another world; they were sorry that she had died so young, they were shocked that she had died at all; but, had she been a Kanaka or Lascar bunker-rat, they could not have troubled less to wonder whether she had mother or sisters to mourn her; she was a super from the theatrical underworld, and her ill-judged time and place of dying had put them into a very embarrassing position. When Jack hinted at a social boycott of Barbara, he was threatening, what he only lacked power to enforce; she deserved punishment, and, if he could not punish her as she deserved, he could at least get far away from her to a society which took death seriously.
"I'm not sufficiently interested, I'm afraid," he answered with languid boredom that thinly veiled his disgust.