For perhaps the fourth time that night I picked up my hat and cane. However little I might care for Beresford, common humanity ordained that this kind of game should end.
"This fellow's an invalid," I reminded her. "You're only making him worse by exciting him. You had better let me see you home. Taxis are few and far between, and I took the precaution of telling mine to wait."
She turned her little platinum watch to the light and compared it with the clock on the mantel-piece.
"I can get a train, you know," she told me, losing all her irritability and becoming matter-of-fact. "And I hate going to bed more than anything in the world except getting up. When we had a house in Rutland Gate my first season, Lord John Carstairs who lived next door always used to say that he knew it was time for breakfast when he heard my taxi bringing me home after a ball. So nice to feel that one sometimes really does one's duty to one's neighbour; it justifies the church catechism. He was very grateful about it and, whenever I lost my latch-key, he used to come down and help me in through the fan-light. Then there was a dreadful day when I got stuck on a piece of broken glass—father's bill for fan-lights was so heavy that we couldn't take a moor that year; he always thought it was the suffragettes—and Lord John stood below in the divinest green silk pyjamas and an Austrian military cloak, I lay half-way through the fan-light, we exhausted every possible topic of conversation, including the Academy, and at last he proposed to me. I've never been so angry in my life! If he'd proposed first and talked about the Academy afterwards, nobody could have minded."
Having prattled herself into a good temper, she paused to take a cigarette from a gold case at her wrist. I reminded her that we had lost sight of the particular in the general.
"It is late," I said. "Too late for you to be calling on young bachelors and far too late to be left unchaperoned."
Her big brown eyes, usually soft and entreating, gave forth a glint of defiance.
"Dear Mr. Stornaway! If you knew how often I'd been to see Peter——"
"That makes it no better."
"You think I'm not respectable," she exclaimed with the slightest perceptible toss of the head.