"Mr. Brent is here. He brought over some Banbury people to play bridge.
They've gone."
"Oh, Brent will amuse you," he replied. "I didn't know you were going to be home, and I've promised these men. I'll come back early."
She hung up the receiver thoughtfully, paused a moment, and went back to the drawing-room. Brent looked up.
"Well," he said, "was I right?"
"You seem always to be right," Honora, sighed.
After dinner they sat in the screened part of the porch which Mrs. Fern had arranged very cleverly as an outside room. Brent had put a rug over Honora's knees, for the ocean breath that stirred the leaves was cold. Across the darkness fragments of dance music drifted fitfully from the Club, and died away; and at intervals, when the embers of his cigar flared up, she caught sight of her companion's face.
She found him difficult to understand. There are certain rules of thumb in every art, no doubt,—even in that most perilous one of lion-taming. But here was a baffling, individual lion. She liked him best, she told herself, when he purred platonically, but she could by no means be sure that his subjection was complete. Sometimes he had scratched her in his play. And however natural it is to desire a lion for one's friend, to be eaten is both uncomfortable and inglorious.
"That's, a remarkable husband of yours," he said at length.
"I shouldn't have said that you were a particularly good judge of husbands," she retorted, after a moment of surprise.
He acknowledged with a laugh the justice of this observation.