“It’s settled?” she asked him, as he came within range.  He looked at me inquiringly—­insolently.  She said, “My brother,” and he answered: 

“Oh, yes,” as I moved away.  I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes off him and her.  I went and stood against the mantel-piece.  The Duc de Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of flourishes as irritating as Gurnard’s nonchalance.

I stood there and glowered at them.  I noted her excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two men.  Of me there was nothing left but the eyes.  I had no mind, no thoughts.  I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—­she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empresse, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine.  He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—­there was something ... something.  I could not quite make out his face, I never could.  I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise hers.  I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been, with him and with a fool like de Mersch—­I should have been afraid.

As for de Mersch, standing between those two, he seemed like a country lout between confederate sharpers.  It struck me that she let me see, made me see, that she and Gurnard had an understanding, made manifest to me by glances that passed when the Duc had his unobservant eyes turned elsewhere.

I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily toward them, drawn in, like a straw toward a little whirlpool.  I turned my back in a fury of jealousy.

CHAPTER NINE

I had a pretty bad night after that, and was not much in the mood for Fox on the morrow.  The sight of her had dwarfed everything; the thought of her disgusted me with everything, made me out of conceit with the world—­with that part of the world that had become my world.  I wanted to get up into hers—­and I could not see any way.  The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road—­to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley.  One day I might hope to occupy such a room—­in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox.  But that was not the end of my career—­not the end that I desired.  She had upset me.

“You’ve just missed Polehampton,” Fox said; “wanted to get hold of your ‘Atmospheres.’”

“Oh, damn Polehampton,” I said, “and particularly damn the ‘Atmospheres.’”

“Willingly,” Fox said, “but I told Mr. P. that you were willing if....”

“I don’t want to know,” I repeated.  “I tell you I’m sick of the things.”

“What a change,” he asserted, sympathetically, “I thought you would.”

It struck me as disgusting that a person like Fox should think about me at all.  “Oh, I’ll see it through,” I said.  “Who’s the next?”