“Oh, indeed!  And just what are your rights in the matter?  You’re not her brother ... you’re surely not her husband.  And I didn’t know that it was the fashion for a....”  His look stopped her.  She trembled a moment, tossed back her head, and finished, defiantly, “Yes, that is what I want to know, what are your rights?”

He took a step toward her.  Instinctively she retreated.

“A woman like you wouldn’t understand even if I were to tell you,” he flung at her.

She covered her face with both hands.

He left the room.

He himself was trembling as he reached the street—­trembling for the first time in years.  As a child he had been given to these fits of emotional tremors, but he had long since lost the faculty for recording physically his intense moments.  Or had he lost the faculty for the intense moments themselves, he found himself wondering, as he walked rapidly toward his home.  The evening was warm with the perfume of a bit of truant summer that had somehow escaped before its time to hearten a winter-weary world against the bitter assaults of March.  Birds of passage sang among the hedges, the sun still cast a faint greenish glow in the extreme west.

His first thought was of the cowering woman he had just left.  He had meant to lash her keenly with his verbal whipcords, but he had not expected to find her quite so sensitive to his cutting scorn.  He remembered the gesture with which she had lifted her hand as if to screen herself from his insults.  There was a whole life of futile compromise in just the manner of that gesture, a growing helplessness to give straightforward thrusts, a pitiful admission of defeat.  But he knew that this surrender was temporary—­a quick lifting of the mask under a relentless pressure.  To-morrow, in an hour, in ten minutes, Lily Condor would be her dangerous self again, lashed into the fury of a woman scorned.  For a moment he did not know whether to be relieved or dismayed at the prospect of Mrs. Condor for an enemy.  How much would she really dare?

He thought with a lowering anger of Flint.  He had been ready to concede everything but this former friend in the role of a cheap and nasty gossip.  No—­gossip was a pale, sickly term.  Flint was a malignant toad, a nauseous mud-slinger, a deliberate liar.  He had heard of men who had justified themselves with vile tales to their insipid, disgustingly virtuous wives, but he had not counted such among his acquaintances.  By the side of Flint, Lily Condor loomed a very paragon of the social amenities.

Stillman was conscious that his mental process was keyed to the highest pitch of melodrama.  It was not usual for him to indulge in mental abuse.  He had never quite understood the dark and moving processes of red-eyed anger.  There had been something absurd in the theatrical hauteur of his manner in this last scene with Mrs. Condor—­that is, if it were measured by his own standards.  His growing detachments from life had claimed him almost to the point of complete indifference.  But now, suddenly, as if Fate had dealt him an insulting blow upon the face with her bare palm, he felt not only rage, but a sense of its futility, its impotence.