"Will that girl never stop playing?" he thought.
Betty came up to him.
"Talk to me, George."
He found himself reluctant, but two tables of bridge were forming, and Betty didn't care to play. Lambert did, and sat down. George followed Betty to a window seat, telling himself she wanted him only because Lambert was for the time, lost to her.
"Now," she said, directly, "what is it, George?"
"What's what?" he asked with an attempt at good-humour.
Her question had made him uneasy, since it suggested that she had observed the trouble he was endeavouring to bury. Would he never learn to repress as Goodhue did? But even Goodhue, he recalled, had failed to hide an acute suffering at a football game; and this game was infinitely bigger, and the point he had just lost vastly more important than a fumbled ball.
"You've changed," Betty was saying. "I'm a good judge, because I haven't really seen you for nearly a year. You've seemed—I scarcely know how to say it—unhappy?"
"Why not tired?" he suggested, listlessly. "You may not know it, but I've been pretty hard at work."
She nodded quickly.