Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache.  “I don’t call it fair or friendly,” he said, “when you know how easily it could have been arranged.  Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told you that the second-class saloon was no place for you.  For you!”

Plainly she did not intend to argue the point.  She poised her chin in her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help seeing, as he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful.  But this had been so long acknowledged between them that she could hardly have been conscious that she was insisting on it afresh.  Then by the time he might have thought her launched upon a different meditation, her mind swept back to his protest, like a whimsical bird.

“I didn’t want to extract anything from the mercantile community of Calcutta in advance,” she said.  “It would be most unbusinesslike.  Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself, as leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season.  Then I think,” she said with defiance, “that I shall avoid you.”

“And pray why?”

“Because you would put too much in.  According to your last letters you are getting beastly rich.  You would take all the tragedy out of the situation, and my experience would vanish in your cheque.”

“I don’t know why my feelings should always be cuffed out of the way of your experiences,” Lindsay said.  She retorted, “Oh yes, you do”; and they regarded each other through an instant’s silence with visible good-fellowship.

“A reasonably strong company this time?” Lindsay asked.

“Thank you.  ‘Company’ is gratifying.  For a month we have been a ’troupe’—­in the first-class end.  Fairish.  Bad to middling.  Fifteen of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors with a thousand candlepower.  Bradley and I will have to do most of the serious work.  But I have improved—­oh, a lot.  You wouldn’t know my Lady Whippleton.”

It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which appeared to prevent Lindsay’s kindling.

“Then Bradley is here too?” he remarked.

“Oh yes,” she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face.  “But it is much better than it was, really.  He is hardly ever troublesome now.  He understands.  And he teaches me a great deal more than I can tell you.  You know,” she asserted, with the effect of taking an independent view, “as an artist he has my unqualified respect.”

“You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when they are not women,” Duff said.  “I don’t believe their behaviour is a bit more affected by their artistry than it would be by a knowledge of the higher mathematics.”

She turned indignant eyes on him.  “Fancy your saying that!  Fancy your having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry!  At what Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?” she cried derisively.  “Well, it shows that one can’t trust one’s best friend loose among the conventions!”