"I may eat your food, Chevalier, but I do not touch your hypocrisy."
"That is a fanatical and rather illogical temper. You do not like my wine, sir, and yet you drink it!"
"I eat to live, but I do not live to lie."
His angry sententiousness amused De Rothan.
"Leave the little moral problems at the bottom of your glass, Mr. Anthony. Why, a month ago you were not so particular. Besides, François here understands English. We need not hang our prejudices out to dry before our servants."
The rest of the meal dragged through in silence. Nance, sitting with downcast eyes, heard De Rothan proposing a walk in the garden.
"I must find you some sweet corner, Miss Nance, where you can dabble your hands among flowers. I am not forgetting that you may like to take a posy up to Mr. Benham."
His ironical good humour troubled her. The garden was a garden of clipped yews, brick paths, and rank green grass, but Nance and her father were distraught and restless, moving and speaking as though under compulsion. Nance had a vague hope that Jeremy might leap up from somewhere, and that De Rothan's cunningly balanced house of cards might come tumbling about his head. But he seemed gay and debonair, inspired by a mischievous and cynical courtesy that bubbled over into playfulness.
"Will you not gather some flowers for Mr. Benham?"
Nance was too much in earnest to be able to match his flippant irony.