The girl sprang up and confronted him with her eyes blazing, but Vane continued dreamily. "There was one I heard of who was the wife of the Dissenting Minister, and did it to bolster up her husband's charities. . . ."
"I think," she said in a low, furious voice, "that you are the most loathsome man I ever met."
Vane looked at her in surprise. "But I thought we were getting on so nicely. I was just going to ask you to have lunch with me one day in town--in your official capacity, of course. . . ."
"If you were the last man in the world, and I was starving, I wouldn't lunch with you in any capacity." Her breast was rising and falling stormily.
"At any rate, it's something to know where we stand," said Vane pleasantly.
"If I'd realised that you were merely a cad--and an outsider of the worst type--do you suppose that I would have talked--would have allowed. . . ." The words died away in her throat, and her shoulders shook. She turned away, biting furiously at her handkerchief with her teeth. "Go away--oh! go away; I hate you."
But Vane did not go away; he merely stood there looking at her with a faint, half-quizzical smile on his lips.
"Joan," he said, after a moment, "I'm thinking I have played the deuce with your general routine. All the earlier performances will be in the nature of an anti-climax after this. But--perhaps, later on, when my abominable remarks are not quite so fresh in your mind, you won't regard them as quite such an insult as you do now. Dreadful outsider though I am--unpardonably caddish though it is to have criticised your war work--especially when I have appreciated it so much--will you try to remember that it would have been far easier and pleasanter to have done the other thing?"
Slowly her eyes came round to his face, and he saw that they were dangerously bright. "What other thing?" she demanded.
"Carried on with the game; the game that both you and I know so well. Hunting, cricket and making love. . . . Is it not written in 'Who's Who'--unless that interesting publication is temporarily out of print?"
"It strikes me," the girl remarked ominously, "that to your caddishness you add a very sublime conceit."
Vane grinned. "Mother always told me I suffered from swelled head. . . ." He pointed to the envelope still unaddressed, lying between them on the writing table. "After which slight digression--do you mind?"