"Did you want Mrs. Shiffney to come so particularly?" Claude asked, not without surprise.
"Yes, I did. Not for myself, of course. I don't pretend to be fond of her, though I don't dislike her! But she ought to have come after accepting. People thought she was coming to-night. I wonder why she rushed off to Paris like that?"
"I should think it was probably something to do with the Senniers. Max Elliot told me just now that she lives and breathes Sennier."
Claude spoke with a quiet humor, and quite without anger.
"Max does exactly the same," said Charmian. "It really becomes rather silly--in a man."
"But Sennier is worth it. Nothing spurious about him."
"I never said there was. But still--Margot is rather tiresome, too, with her rages first for this person and then for the other."
"Yes, after all these months. She's actually going over to America, I believe, just to hear the _Paradis_ once at the Metropolitan. Five days out, five back, and one night there. Isn't it absurd? She's had it put in the _Daily Mail_. And then she says she can't think how things about her get into the papers! Margot really is rather a humbug!"
"Still, she admires the right thing when she admires Sennier's talent," said Claude, with a sort of still decision.
Charmian turned her eyes away from the fire and looked at him.
"How odd you are!" she said, after a little pause.
"In almost every way, I think. But it's all right. You ought to be odd."
"Jacques Sennier's odd, extraordinary. People like that always are. You are."
She was examining him contemplatively, as a woman examines a possession, something that the other women have not. Her look made him feel very restive and intensely reserved.
"I doubt if I am the least like Jacques Sennier," he said.
His rather thin and very mobile lips tightened, as if to keep back a rush of words.
"You don't know yourself," Charmian continued, still looking at him with those contemplative and possessive eyes. "Men don't notice what is part of themselves."
"What does it matter? I am thinking about you, about my man."
There was a long pause, which Claude filled by getting up and lighting a cigarette. A hideous, undressed sensation possessed him, the undressed sensation of the reserved nature that is being stared at. He said to himself: "It is natural that she should look at me like this, speak to me like this. It is perfectly natural." But he hated it. He even felt as if he could not endure it much longer, and would be obliged to do something to stop it.