Then he saw Cosgrave.  He saw him before his companion, though for everyone else she obscured him utterly.  She walked a few steps ahead, a bizarre, fantastic figure, her fair head with its deep band of diamonds lifted audaciously, the same fixed smile of childish expectancy on her oval, painted face.  Her dress had left vulgarity behind.  It was too much a part of herself—­in its way too genuine—­to be merely laughable.  It was like her execrable dancing, the expression of an exuberant, inexhaustible life.  As she walked, with short impatient steps, she swayed the great ostrich-feather fan and twisted her rope of pearls between her slender fingers.  The open stare that greeted her seemed to amuse and please her.

And Cosgrave.  Saville Row, Stonehouse reflected rapidly and contemptuously, must have been bribed to have turned out such perfection at such short notice.  Too much perfection and too new.  An upstart young rake.  No, not quite that, either.  Pain had lent an elusive beauty to the plain and freckled face, and happiness had made it lovable.  It was obvious that he was trying to suppress his pride and astonishment at himself and not succeeding.  The corners of his mouth quivered shyly and self-consciously, and the wide-open eyes were fixed with an engaging steadfastness on the figure in front of him as though he knew that if he looked to the right or left he would give himself away altogether.  Stonehouse could almost hear his voice, high-pitched and boyish.

“Oh, I say, Robert, isn’t it wonderful—­isn’t she splendid?”

Stonehouse himself stood right across their path.  It was accidental, and now he could not move.  He had grown to rely too much on his emotional inaccessibility, and the violence and suddenness of his anger transfixed him.  This woman had trapped Cosgrave.  She had caught him in the dangerous moment of convalescence—­in that rebound from inertia which carries men to an excess incredible to their normal conscience.  And she was infamous.  She had broken one man after another.

She could not have overlooked Stonehouse.  Apart from his conspicuous clothes, his immobility and white-set face must have inevitably drawn her attention to him.  Her eyes, very blue and shadowless, met his stare with a kind of bonhomie—­almost a Masonic understanding—­and the uncompromising antagonism that replied seemed to check her.  She hesitated, then as he at last stood back, passed on still smiling, but mechanically, as though something had surprised her into forgetting why she smiled.

Cosgrave followed her.  He brushed against Stonehouse without recognition.