t, then?

He couldn't, because of those two infernal, bilingual little
monkeys. They were clinging to her skirts all the way down the hill.

They were all going to Nice the next day; and that evening the de
Vignolles had gone down to the Casino and Vera hadn't gone. It would
have been all right if the children had not been allowed to sit up
to see the conjuror conjuring in the lounge. But they had sat up;
and that had brought it to ten o'clock before he had Vera for a
minute to himself.

He may have chosen his moment badly (it wasn't easy to choose it
well, living, as the de Vignolles did, in public), and perhaps, if
they hadn't had that little difference of opinion, he and she---- It
was in the evening that they had had it, between the conjuring
tricks and the children's chatter, in the public, the intolerably
public lounge, and it was only a difference of opinion, opinion
concerning the beauty of the beautiful and hypothetical lady who was
looking at him then, who had never ceased to look at him and Vera
and the children when any of them were about.

Thesiger couldn't get Vera to say that the lady was beautiful, and
the little that she did say implied that you couldn't be beautiful
if you looked like that. She was not beautiful (Thesiger had
admitted it) in Vera's way, and on the whole he was glad to think
that Vera didn't look like that; but there was, he had contended, a
beauty absolute and above opinion, and the lady had it. That was
all. Perhaps, now he came to think of it, he ought not to have drawn
Vera's attention to her; for he knew what Vera had thought of her by
the things she hadn't said, and, what was worse, he knew what Paul
de Vignolles thought by the things he _had_ said, things implying
that, if the lady were honest, appearances were against her. Of her
and of her honesty Thesiger didn't feel very sure himself. He found
himself continually looking at her to make sure. He had been looking
at her then, across the little table in the lounge where she and her
two men sat drinking coffee and liqueurs. She kept thrusting her
face between the two as she talked; she had a rose in her bronze
hair, which made him dubious; and when their eyes met, as they were
always meeting (how could he help it?), his doubt leaped in him and
fastened on her face. Her face had held him for a moment so with all
his doubt, and he had stared at her and flamed in a curious
excitement born of Vera's presence and of hers, while h