“I say, can I use your telephone a minute?” He found a strange Concepcion in the drawing-room.  This was his first sight of Mrs. Carlos Smith since the wedding.  She wore a dress such as he had never seen on her:  a tea-gown—­and for lunch!  It could be called neither neat nor prim, but it was voluptuous.  Her complexion had bloomed; the curves of her face were softer, her gestures more abandoned, her gaze full of a bold and yet shamed self-consciousness, her dark hair looser.  He stood close to her; he stood within the aura of her recently aroused temperament, and felt it.  He thought, could not help thinking:  “Perhaps she bears within her the legacy of new life.”  He could not help thinking of her name.  He took her hot hand.  She said nothing, but just looked at him.  He then said jauntily: 

“I say, can I use your telephone a minute?” Fortunately, the telephone was in the bedroom.  He went farther upstairs and shut himself in the bedroom, and saw naught but the telephone surrounded by the mysterious influences of inanimate things in the gay, crowded room.

“Is that you, Mrs. Trevise?  It’s G.J. speaking.  G.J....  Hoape.  Yes.  Listen.  I’m at Concepcion’s for lunch, and I want you to come over as quickly as you can.  I’ve got very bad news indeed—­the worst possible.  Carlos has been killed at the Front.  What?  Yes, awful, isn’t it?  She doesn’t know.  I have the job of telling her.”

Now that the words had been spoken in Concepcion’s abode the reality of Carlos Smith’s death seemed more horribly convincing than before.  And G.J., speaker of the words, felt almost as guilty as though he himself were responsible for the death.  When he had rung off he stood motionless in the room until the opening of the door startled him.  Concepcion appeared.

“If you’ve done corrupting my innocent telephone ...” she said, “lunch is cooling.”

He felt a murderer.

At the lunch-table she might have been a genuine South American.  Nobody could be less like Christine than she was; and yet in those instants she incomprehensibly reminded him of Christine.  Then she started to talk in her old manner of a professional and renowned talker.  G.J. listened attentively.  They ate.  It was astounding that he could eat.  And it was rather surprising that she did not cry out:  “G.J.  What the devil’s the matter with you to-day?” But she went on talking evenly, and she made him recount his doings.  He related the conversation at the club, and especially what Bob, the retired judge, had said about equilibrium on the Western Front.  She did not want to hear anything as to the funeral.

“We’ll have champagne,” she said suddenly to the parlour-maid, who was about to offer some red wine.  And while the parlour-maid was out of the room she said to G.J., “There isn’t a country in Europe where champagne is not a symbol, and we must conform.”

“A symbol of what?”

“Ah!  The unusual.”