Jack touched his lips with one finger.
"We needn't take the whole room into our confidence," he whispered. "So this was your revenge? I congratulate you, Lady Barbara.... Or were you convincing me of my mistake? Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn't see you hadn't finished eating."
He laid his cigarette beside his plate and turned half round. Every one else seemed to be enjoying himself prodigiously. Twenty shrill-voiced conversations met and struggled; laughter swelled and died away. Some one proposed Jim's health and tried to coerce him into replying. Lady Loring appeared for a moment in the musicians' gallery, smiled contentedly on her handiwork and withdrew. Their lightness of heart was hard to bear, and the ecstasy in Violet's eyes was insupportable. Jack turned back to his own table. He was not going to marry Barbara; if he repeated it often enough, he might come to believe it; he was desperately tired and could not think what to do next.
A sudden hush, followed by a scrape of feet and the creak of moving chairs, greeted the opening bars of a waltz. Plaintive voices enquired for lost gloves, and in another minute Jack and Barbara had the room to themselves. She gripped the chair harder, bracing herself to receive her punishment; and, as he sat half asleep, she could have complimented him on his refined cruelty in making her wait for it. Gradually he seemed to see that the room had emptied, to guess that she expected him to speak; his expression changed, and, with it, her own dumb readiness to take whatever he might choose to mete out. There was still no anger, hardly even resentment; but his mouth was pursed in disgust, as though a toad had leaped on to his plate. Barbara felt herself aflame with desire to justify herself.
"I've finished now, if you want to smoke," she said. "Jack, I don't want to reopen this, you must see that it would be hopeless! You disapprove of everything I do. You may be right: we won't discuss that. I'm a gipsy, and you're—I don't know what you are."
Jack reminded himself again that he was not going to marry Barbara. For three months and more he had never doubted it; when Jim Loring frowned and hesitated and let fall apprehensive uncertainties, he had answered with easy confidence, as though challenged to declare his belief in the solar system. Three minutes, or less, was a short time for readjustment, but he was beginning to repeat the sentence with his brain as well as with his lips. And so far he had not publicly disgraced himself in any way....
"I don't think we'll discuss anything," he said.
Barbara moved her chair, but he did not seem to notice it: he noticed nothing, and the silence was unendurable. She asked for a cigarette, and he gave her one, silently lighting a match.
"I'm—sorry, Jack," she said at last.
"You're losing nothing," he answered.