In that moment Stonehouse’s anger ran away with him.  Thrusting aside the protests of a puzzled and rather frightened waiter he chose a table that faced them both.  Cosgrave, blindly absorbed, never looked towards him, but twice she met his eyes, still with a faintly puzzled amusement, as though every moment she expected to penetrate a mask of crude enmity to a no less crude admiration and desire.  Then she spoke to Cosgrave laughingly, as Stonehouse knew, with the light curiosity of a woman who has met something tantalizingly novel, and Cosgrave turned, uttered an exclamation, and a moment later came across.  He acted like a man suffering from aphasia.  He seemed totally oblivious of the immediate past.  They might have been casual friends who had met casually.  He was radiant.

“What luck your being here.  I didn’t know you went in for frivolity of this sort—­if you call it frivolous dining in solitary state.  Come over and join us.  We’re just having a bite before the show.  You remember Mademoiselle Labelle, don’t you?”

Stonehouse nodded assent.  He left his table at once.  He seemed frigidly composed, but he was sure that she would not be deceived.  She knew too much about men—­that was her business—­and she meant to pay him out, make him seem crude and absurd in his own eyes.

“It’s Stonehouse—­my old friend—­I was telling you about him—­we don’t need to introduce you, Mademoiselle.”

She gave him her hand, palm down, to kiss, and he turned it over deliberately.  The fingers were loaded to the knuckles.  He reflected that each of these stones had its history, tragic, comic or merely sordid.  He let her hand drop.  He saw that the affront had not touched her.  Perhaps others had begun like that.

“Ce cher docteur—­’e don’t like me,” she complained pathetically to Cosgrave. “’E sit opposite to me and glare like a ’ungry tiger.  Believe me, I grow quite cold with fear.  Tell me why you don’t like me, Monsieur?”

“He was only wanting to be asked,” Cosgrave broke in with his high, excited laugh.  “Why, he introduced us.  I was all down and out—­couldn’t decide which bridge to chuck myself off from—­and he lugged me into your show.  He said——­”

“Well, what ’e say?”

Cosgrave blushed.

“He said:  ‘Let’s see what going to the devil can do for you.’”

She jerked a jewelled thumb at him, appealing to Stonehouse.

“’E ’as cheek, that young man.  ’E send in ’is card to my dressing-room, saying ’e got to meet me. Comme ca!  As though anyone could just walk in!  I was curious to see a young man with cheek like that.  So I let ’im come. Et nous voila!” She leant across to Stonehouse, speaking confidentially, earnestly.  “But you—­c’est autre chose—­monsieur est bien range—­an artist perhaps for all that—­’e see me dance and think perhaps, ’Voyons—­she cannot dance at all—­nor sing—­nor nozzings.  Just enjoy ‘erself.’  You think I don’t deserve all I get, hein?”