"But he can be back within an hour," Lady Pentyre urged. "It's still quite early."
Lady Barbara looked uncertainly at Jack, waiting for him to become more inviting. His face expressed no concern, and he was patiently gaining time by consulting his watch and looking from one to the other of them, as though he had no personal interest in the decision.
"Would that be agreeable to you?" he asked her at length.
"I don't feel that I have any right to spoil your evening."
"Illness is hardly within your control, is it?"
She walked downstairs with a novel sense of failure and a misgiving that she had overestimated his stupidity; yet a man must be more than ordinarily stupid not to appreciate her after the trouble that she had taken. Insisting on an open car, she settled herself in one corner and looked thoughtfully at her companion's reflection in the jolting mirror of the wind-screen. Valentine Arden, who allowed disparagement to become a disease, told her to her face that she had genius; George Oakleigh had said that she had "the clearest-cut personality of her time." And these things were industriously repeated to her.
Rather Lord Crawleigh's daughter than Sir Adolf Erckmann's friend.... But Lord Crawleigh's world had no place for any woman who was above the average. In Canada, in Ireland and in India she had tasted greater personal success before she was sixteen than London could offer her in a life-time. She had seen the government of India at very close quarters; and, after that, it was impossible to feel Sonia Dainton's elation at bobbing to Royalty at the Bodmin Lodge ball in Ascot week. At other times and in other places, dusty, long streets, dazzling white and quivering with heat, had been cleared for her and lined with picked native troops; in an Empire crowded with immemorial soveranties she had been the only daughter of a man who was vicegerent of the Emperor-King.
"You spoke too soon in saying you didn't despise me," she murmured.
They had covered but two of the ten miles, and Jack instinctively avoided altercation. He was no longer interested in a girl who deliberately invited herself to the same house, singled him out and detached him, in an open car and a north-east wind, to pick a quarrel or justify herself.
"If you're feeling ill, why don't you try to go to sleep instead of making conversation?" he suggested.