“You will receive the notice, of course,” said the chairman.

Down below, just as G.J. was getting away with Christine’s chrysanthemums in their tissue paper, Lady Queenie darted out of the lift opposite.  It was she who, at Concepcion’s instigation, had had him put in the committee.

“I say, Queen,” he said with a casual air—­on account of the flowers, “who’s been telling ’em I know about accounts?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she said maliciously.  “Don’t you keep an account of every penny you spend?” (It was true.)

Here was a fair example of her sardonic and unscrupulous humour—­a humour not of words but of acts.  G.J. simply tossed his head, aware of the futility of expostulation.

She went on in a different tone: 

“You were the first to see Connie?”

“Yes,” he said sadly.

“She has lain in my arms all afternoon,” Lady Queenie burst out, her voice liquid.  “And now I’m going straight back to her.”  She looked at him with the strangest triumphant expression.  Then her large, equivocal blue eyes fell from his face to the flowers, and their expression simultaneously altered to disdainful amusement full of mischievous implications.  She ran off without another word.  The glazed entrance doors revolved, and he saw her nip into an electric brougham, which, before he had time to button his overcoat, vanished like an apparition in the rainy mist.

Chapter 15

EVENING OUT

He found Christine exactly as he had left her, in the same tea-gown and the same posture, and on the same sofa.  But a small table had been put by the sofa; and on this table was a penny bottle of ink in a saucer, and a pen.  She was studying some kind of official form.  The pucker between the eyes was very marked.

“Already!” she exclaimed, as if amazed.  “But there is not a clock that goes, and I had not the least idea of the hour.  Besides, I was splitting my head to fill up this form.”

Such was her notion of being exact!  He had abandoned an important meeting of a committee which was doing untold mercies to her compatriots in order to keep his appointment with her; and she, whose professional business it was that evening to charm him and harmonise with him, had merely flouted the appointment.  Nevertheless, her gestures and smile as she rose and came towards him were so utterly exquisite that immediately he also flouted the appointment.  What, after all, could it matter whether they dined at eight, nine, or even ten o’clock?

“Thou wilt pardon me, monster?” she murmured, kissing him.

No woman had ever put her chin up to his as she did, nor with a glance expressed so unreserved a surrender to his masculinity.

She went on, twining languishingly round him: 

“I do not know whether I ought to go out.  I am yet far from—­It is perhaps imprudent.”