"How do you know?" queried Kitty whimsically. "You're only a woman."
"Why, because I've used my eyes, my dear! . . . But in this case it seems we were all mistaken. If ever a man deliberately set himself to make a woman care, Maryon Rooke was the man. And when he'd succeeded--he went away."
Kitty produced a small gold cigarette case from the depths of an elaborate bead bag and extracted a cigarette. She lit it and began smoking reflectively.
"And I suppose all this, coming on top of the staleness of things in general after the war, has flattened her out?"
"A little. He came here to say good-bye to her before going to France--"
"I know," interpolated Kitty. "He's going there to paint Princess Somebody-or-other while she's staying in Paris."
"Well, I came in when he'd left and found Nan sitting like a stone statue, gazing blankly in front of her. She wouldn't say much, but bit by bit I dragged it out of her. Since then she has never referred to the matter again. She is quite gay at times in a sort of artificial way, but she doesn't do any work, though she spends odd moments fooling about at the piano. She goes out morning, noon, and night, and comes back dead-beat, apparently not having enjoyed herself at all. Can you imagine Nan like that?"
"I believe he's taken the savour out of things for her," said Penelope, adding slowly, in a voice that was quite unlike her usual practical tones: "Brushed the bloom off the world for her."
"Poor old Nan! She must be hard hit. . . . She's never been hurt badly before."
"Never--before she met that man. I can't forgive him, Kitty. I'm horribly afraid what sort of effect this miserable affair is going to have on a girl of Nan's queer temperament."
Kitty turned the matter over in her mind in silence. Then with a small, sage nod of her red head, she advanced a suggestion.
"Bring her over to dinner to-morrow--no, not to-morrow, I'm booked. Say Thursday, and I'll have a nice man to meet her. She needs someone to play around with. There's nothing like another man to knock the first one out of a woman's head. It's cure by homeopathy."
"It's a bit of bad luck on the second man, isn't it--if he's nice? You know, Nan is rather fatal to the peace of the male mind."