‘You said I should change—­I remember your words.’  Her voice was quiet and thoughtful, whatever she felt.  ’I suppose there is something about me now that grates on your nerves.’

There was no resentment in her tone, nor the least intonation of sarcasm.  But Lushington said nothing; he was thinking of the time when he had thought her an ideal of refined girlhood, and had believed in his heart that she could never stand the life of the stage, and would surely give it up in sheer disgust, no matter how successful she might be.  Yet now, she did not even seem offended by what he had told her.  So much the better, he thought; for he was far too truthful to take back one word in order to make peace, even if she burst into tears.  Possibly, of the two, his reflections were sadder than hers just then, but she interrupted them with a question.

‘Can you tell me of any one thing I do that jars on you?’ she asked.  ‘Or is it what I say, or my way of speaking?  I should like to know.’

‘It’s nothing, and it’s everything,’ answered Lushington, taking refuge in a commonplace phrase, ’and I suppose no one else would ever notice it.  But I’m so awfully sensitive about certain things.  You know why.’

She knew why; yet it was with a sort of wonder that she asked herself what there was in her tone or manner that could remind him of his mother; but though she had spoken quietly, and almost humbly, a cold and secret anger was slowly rising in her.  The great artist, who held thousands spellbound and breathless, could not submit easily to losing in such a way the only friendship that had ever meant much to her.  The man who had just told her that she had lost her charm for him meant that she was sinking to the level of her surroundings, and he was the only man she had ever believed that she loved.  Two years ago, and even less, she would have been generously angry with him, and would have spoken out, and perhaps all would have been over; but those two years of life on the stage had given her the self-control of an actress when she chose to exercise it, and she had acquired an artificial command of her face and voice which had not belonged to her original frank and simple self.  Perhaps Lushington knew that too, as a part of the change that offended his taste.  At twenty-two, Margaret Donne would have coloured, and would have given him a piece of her young mind very plainly; Margarita da Cordova, aged twenty-four, turned a trifle paler, shut her lips, and was frigidly angry, as if some ignorant music-hall reporter had attacked her singing in print.  She was convinced that Lushington was mistaken, and that he was merely yielding to that love of finding fault with what he liked which a familiar passage in Scripture attributes to the Divinity, but with which many of us are better acquainted in our friends; in her opinion, such fault-finding was personal criticism, and it irritated her vanity, over-fed with public adulation and the sincere praise of musical critics.  ’If you don’t like me as I am, there are so many people who do that you don’t count!’ That was the sub-conscious form of her mental retort, and it was in the manner of Cordova, and not of Margaret.