She shot her defiant merriment into his face.  “Has it kept you?”

“I?—­Oh, I wasn’t bound that way, you know—­but why do you ask?”

For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which even to herself she could not express—­for too sharp a prick of unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of uncertainty?

“Oh, one hears, you know,” she replied indifferently.

“One hears!  And what is it that one hears?”

His voice was hard, almost angry, and she despised herself because the fierce sound of it made her suddenly afraid.

“Do you know what a man said to me the other day,” she went on with a cool insolence before which he became suddenly quiet.  “Whom the gods destroy they first infatuate—­with an opera singer.”

She delivered the words straight from the shoulder, and as she finished he rose from his chair and stood looking angrily down upon her.

“Did you let me come here for this?” he demanded.

“O Arnold, Arnold!” the gayety rang back to her voice, and she made a charming little face of affected terror.  “If you’re going to be a bear I’ll run away.”

She stretched out her hand, and he held it for an instant in his own, while he fell back impatiently into his chair.

“The truth is that I was clean mad about her,” he said, “about Madame Alta—­but it’s over now, and I abominate everything that has ever set foot on the stage.”

“Was she really beautiful?” she enquired curiously.

He laughed sharply.  “Beautiful!  She was flesh—­if you mean that.”

An angry sigh escaped him, and Gerty lighted a fresh cigarette and gave it to him with a soothing gesture.  The nervous movements which were characteristic of him became more frequent, and she found herself wondering that they should increase rather than diminish the impression of virile force.  For a while he smoked in silence; then, with his eyes still turned away from her, he asked in a changed voice.

“Tell me about your friend—­she interests me.”

“She interests you!  Laura?”

“There’s something in her that I like,” he pursued, smiling at her exclamation.  “She looks human, natural, real.  By Jove, she looks as if she were capable of big emotions—­as if, too, you could like her without making love.  She’s something new.”

Gerty’s amazement was so sincere that she only stared at him, while her red lips parted slightly in a breathless and perfectly unaffected surprise.  Something new!  Her wonder faded slowly, and she told herself that now at last she understood.  So he was still what he had always been—­an impatient seeker after fresh sensations.

“I thought you were too much like Perry to care about her,” she said.

His amused glance made the remark appear suddenly ridiculous.  “I’m different from Perry in one thing at least,” he retorted.  “You didn’t marry me.”