Callendar came in late for tea. She heard the footman speaking to him as he came through the vast hall across the tesselated floor. She waited for him, sitting behind the silver tea things in the small sitting room at the back of the house, and as he entered she was seized again by the disturbing fear of losing herself. He kissed her, casually, and said, "Well, have you had a busy day?"
"Nothing. . . . I went shopping with Madeleine and lunched alone at the Ritz."
She might easily have added, "And whom do you think I saw there?" But she did not. On the contrary, she said, "It's a funny show . . . the Ritz. . . . And you? . . . What have you done?"
She did not hear his answer, because her attention was swallowed up by a sharp sense of his presence . . . a vivid image of the dark face and the fine, muscular hand as he raised his silk kerchief in a familiar gesture to stroke his mustaches. In the back of her mind a small voice told her that it was perilous and awful to have such emotions.
She poured his tea but he did not drink it.
"I'll have a glass of port," was his reply. And then, "I had luck to-day. I won eleven thousand francs at baccarat . . . playing with Henri and Posselt, the Russian."
"Good," was her reply, and again it was not what she might have said. This gambling worried her. It was not that he would bring them to poverty by it; that was almost impossible. But there was in her mind a feeling of disgust at the picture of men spending five hours of daylight in gambling. She tried to reproach herself by the thought that the idea was American and provincial. But she understood why his mother sometimes reproached him for not thinking more of his business. (Always he retorted that she liked business and he did not.)
There was silence and presently Sabine said, "I wonder, Dick, if we can't do something about this house . . . either take one of our own or clear out some of this rubbish."
