“Very well.”

“You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“Why should I be?”

“I thought perhaps you were.”

There was a pause.  “Is there anything amusing about being loved?” she thought; “what patient women the great coquettes of the world must have been!  How I wish I were a crisp intelligent old maid, with a talent perhaps for gardening or books on the Renaissance!”

“How tired you look!” He had taken her hand and was pressing it with funny little jerky grasps.  “I wish you belonged to me; I wouldn’t let you spend yourself on every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

“It is so difficult to know,” she murmured, “who is Tom, who is Dick, or who is Harry!”

“When I think of the way your divine sympathy is imposed upon—­the way your friends take advantage of you!”

“But I like being taken advantage of.”

“People’s selfishness makes me sick.  Look at your white face and your drooping eyelids, and your tired little smiles.”

“I am sorry.”

“Sorry!  Good God!  My beloved, do take care of yourself, please.  Promise me not to see any one after I leave; go to bed and pull the blinds.”

“But I am expecting Bill.”

“Bill will be all the better for not getting what he wants for once.”

“But supposing he doesn’t want it?”

“I don’t understand.”

The door opened.

“Bill!” She put out her left hand, all her features lit up with a quiet luminous radiance.  His eyes were smiling, but his mouth was grave.

“Elaine!” He said it as if it were a very significant remark, and, though he hadn’t meant to, he caressed her name with his voice.

“Mortimer thinks I ought to go to bed and send you away.”

“But you won’t?”

“Probably not.”  She was bubbling over with gaiety.  “I am very weak-minded.”

The two men were not looking at one another, but currents of hostility flowed between them.  Bill had not fought for Elaine’s love; it had come to him with a strange inevitability.  He had no fear of losing it and no particular desire to keep it, but the thought that you possess something that some one else passionately covets is always exhilarating.  He would never have admitted it—­he could never have admitted it, but she was to him like an object dangled on a watch chain—­not obtrusively displayed but a possession recognised by everybody and taken for granted by him.  Only he never seemed bored because he was never tired of mobilising his own charms.  And in herself, she delighted him—­it was only in her relations with him that she got on his nerves.  He loved to see her with other men exercising the divine arts of her irresistibility, her every smile, her every gesture, the intonations of her voice, the turn of her head, her bubbling brilliance, her cool indifference, the ice of her intellect, the glow of her sympathy, each contributing to the masterpiece of her coquetry.  But with him she was not even a coquette—­jerky, passionate, nervous, humble, exacting, dull—­she tired him to death.