Then I knew that, whether Jane had ever been in love with Hobart or not, she was not so now.  I knew further, or thought I knew, that she saw him precisely as I did.

Of course she didn’t.  His beauty came in—­it always does, between men and women, confusing the issues—­and her special relation to him, and a hundred other things.  The relation between husband and wife is too close and too complex for clear thinking.  It seems always to lead either to too much regard or to an excess of irritation, and often to both.

Jane looked away from Hobart, and met my eyes watching her.  Her expression didn’t alter, nor, probably, did mine.  But something passed between us; some unacknowledged mutual understanding held us together for an instant.  It was unconscious on Jane’s part and involuntary on mine.  She hadn’t meant to think over her husband with me; I hadn’t meant to push in.  Jane wasn’t loyal, and I wasn’t well-bred, but we neither of us meant that.

I hardly talked to Jane that evening.  She was talking after dinner to Katherine and the American Legation.  I had a three-cornered conversation with Hobart and the Legation’s wife, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, like all of her race, and asked us exhausting questions.  She got on to the Jewish question, and asked us for our views on the reasons for anti-Semitism in Europe.

‘I’ve been reading the New Witness,’ she said.

I told her she couldn’t do better, if she was investigating anti-Semitism.

‘But are they fair?’ she asked ingenuously.

I replied that there were moments in which I had a horrible suspicion that they were.

’Then the Jews are really a huge conspiracy plotting to get the finances of Europe into their hands?’ Her eyes, round and shocked, turned from me to Hobart.

He lightly waved her to me.

‘You must ask Mr. Gideon.  The children of Israel are his speciality.’

His dislike of me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold smile.  The Legation’s wife (no fool) must have seen it.

I went on talking rubbish to her about the Jews and the finances of Europe.  I don’t remember what particular rubbish it was, for I was hardly aware of it at the time.  What I was vividly and intensely and quite suddenly aware of was that I was on fire with the same anger, dislike, and contempt that burned in Hobart towards me.  I knew that evening that I hated him, even though I was sitting in his house and smoking his cigarettes.  I wanted to be savagely rude to him.  I think that once or twice I came very near to being so.

Katherine and I went home by the same bus.  I grumbled to her about Hobart all the way.  I couldn’t help it; the fellow seemed suddenly to have become a nervous disease to me; I was mentally wriggling and quivering with him.

Katherine laughed presently, in that queer, silent way of hers.

‘Why worry?’ she said. ‘You’ve not married him.’