ill frequently, for he was a man who believed in keeping
the world in its place, but she never. To her he had always been the
perfect, gracious knight. A little too perfect, perhaps, a trifle too
gracious, possibly, but she had been too deeply in love to notice
that. "Don't be cross!"

The English language is the richest in the world, and yet somehow in
moments when words count most we generally choose the wrong ones. The
adjective "cross" as a description of his Jove-like wrath that
consumed his whole being jarred upon Derek profoundly. It was as
though Prometheus, with the vultures tearing his liver, had been asked
if he were piqued.

"Cross!"

The cab rolled on. Lights from lamp-posts flashed in at windows. It
was a pale, anxious little face that they lit up when they shone upon
Jill.

"I can't understand you," said Derek at last. Jill noticed that he had
not yet addressed her by her name. He was speaking straight out in
front of him as if he were soliloquising. "I simply cannot understand
you. After what happened before dinner to-night, for you to cap
everything by going off alone to supper at a restaurant, where half
the people in the room must have known you, with a man...."

"You don't understand!"

"Exactly! I said I did not understand." The feeling of having scored a
point made Derek feel a little better. "I admit it. Your behaviour is
incomprehensible. Where did you meet this fellow?"

"I met him at the theatre. He was the author of the play."

"The man you told me you had been talking to? The fellow who scraped
acquaintance with you between the acts?"

"But I found out he was an old friend. I mean, I knew him when I was a
child."

"You didn't tell me that."

"I only found it out later."

"After he had invited you to supper! It's maddening!" cried Derek, the
sense of his wrongs surging back over him. "What do you suppose my
mother thought? She asked me who the man with you was. I had to say I
didn't know! What do you suppose she thought?"

It is to be doubted whether anything else in the world could have
restored the fighting spirit to Jill's cowering soul at that moment;
but the reference to Lady Underhill achieved this miracle. That deep
mutual antipathy which is so much more common than love at first sight
had sprung up between the two at the instant of their meeting. The
circumstances of that meeting had caused it to take root and grow. To
Jill, Derek's mother was by this time not so much