“In one specific way,” I replied, “I think she is.”

“Oh, rubbish, Hilary!” she smiled, and swung her little foot.  “You, a man of the world, how can you talk so?  First she runs off with that dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery.  What respectable woman—­well, what honest woman, according to the term of the lower classes—­would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?”

“She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry her.  She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there’s no question of marriage or anything else between them.”

“Sancta simplicitas!” She shook her head from side to side and looked at me pityingly.  “I’ll allow Jaffery is just a fool.  But she isn’t.  The best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense.  I know the type.”

“Where have you studied it, my dear?” I asked.

She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her ready sureness: 

“In my father’s drawing-room among city people and in my own among literary people.”

“H’m!” said I.  “Lioshas don’t grow on every occasional chair.”

“You’re as bemused as Barbara.”

“I haven’t studied what you call the type,” I replied.  “But I’ve studied an individual, which you haven’t.”

She swung off the table.  “Oh, well, have it your own way—­Paul and Virginia, if you like.  What does it matter to me?”

“Yes, my dear,” said I.  “That’s just it—­what the dickens does it matter to you?”

“Nothing at all.”  She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.

“You’ve turned Jaffery out of your house,” I continued, with malicious intent.  “You’ve sworn never to set eyes on him again.  You’ve banished him beyond your horizon.  His doings now can be no concern of yours.  If he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn’t he?  What would it have to do with you?”

“Only this,” said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting on it.  “It would make Jaffery’s declaration to me all the more insulting.”

“’Having known me to decline’?” I quoted.

“Precisely.”

She tossed her head, in her wounded pride.  But unknowingly she had swallowed my bait.  I had hooked my little fish.  I smiled to myself.  She was eaten up with jealousy.

“Well,” said I, “you remember the French proverb about the absent being always in the wrong.  Let us wait until they come back and hear what they’ve got to say for themselves.”

She put her hands behind her back.  As she stood, her little black and ivory head was not much above the level of mine.  “What they may say is a matter of perfect indifference to me.”

I bent forward.  “I think I ought to tell you what Jaffery’s—­practically—­last words to me were:  ’There’s only one woman in the world for me.’  Meaning you.”  She broke away with a laugh.  “And to prove it, he elopes with the fat woman!  Oh, Hilary”—­with the tips of her fingers she brushed my hair—­“you really are a simple old dear!”