She was brazen!

“Is that all you have to say?”

“No.”

“Well, speak out!”

“What is the good of talking?”

Soames said icily:  “So you admit it?”

“I admit nothing.  You are a fool to ask.  A man like you should not ask. 
It is dangerous.”

Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.

“Do you remember,” he said, halting in front of her, “what you were when I married you?  Working at accounts in a restaurant.”

“Do you remember that I was not half your age?”

Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to the David Cox.

“I am not going to bandy words.  I require you to give up this —­friendship.  I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur.”

“Ah!—­Fleur!”

“Yes,” said Soames stubbornly; “Fleur.  She is your child as well as mine.”

“It is kind to admit that!”

“Are you going to do what I say?”

“I refuse to tell you.”

“Then I must make you.”

Annette smiled.

“No, Soames,” she said.  “You are helpless.  Do not say things that you will regret.”

Anger swelled the veins on his forehead.  He opened his mouth to vent that emotion, and could not.  Annette went on: 

“There shall be no more such letters, I promise you.  That is enough.”

Soames writhed.  He had a sense of being treated like a child by this woman who had deserved he did not know what.

“When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had better be quiet about each other.  There are things one does not drag up into the light for people to laugh at.  You will be quiet, then; not for my sake for your own.  You are getting old; I am not, yet.  You have made me ver-ry practical”

Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked, repeated dully: 

“I require you to give up this friendship.”

“And if I do not?”

“Then—­then I will cut you out of my Will.”

Somehow it did not seem to meet the case.  Annette laughed.

“You will live a long time, Soames.”

“You—­you are a bad woman,” said Soames suddenly.

Annette shrugged her shoulders.

“I do not think so.  Living with you has killed things in me, it is true; but I am not a bad woman.  I am sensible—­that is all.  And so will you be when you have thought it over.”

“I shall see this man,” said Soames sullenly, “and warn him off.”

“Mon cher, you are funny.  You do not want me, you have as much of me as you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead.  I admit nothing, but I am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had better be quiet, I tell you.  I myself will make no scandal; none.  Now, I am not saying any more, whatever you do.”