If you dance with me. . . ."

Obviously she knew that the severely elegant men and women on either hand
watched her with a covert, chilly hostility. But there was something
oddly simple in her acceptance of their attitude. Therein, no doubt, lay
some of her power. She was herself. She didn't care. She was too
strong. She had ruined people like that--people every whit as hostile,
and self-assured, and respectable--and had gone free without a scratch.
She could afford to laugh at them, to ignore them, as it pleased her.

(And what would Frances Wilmot with her wrong-headed toleration, have
urged in extenuation? A hard life, perhaps? Stonehouse smiled
ironically at himself. The old quarrel was like an ineradicable drop of
poison in the blood.)

She smoked incessantly. She ate very little. And as time went on she
seemed to draw away from the two men into a kind of secret ecstasy of
enjoyment like some fierce animal scenting freedom. The sentences she
dropped were shallow, impatient, even stupid. And yet there was Rufus
Cosgrave with his hungry eyes fixed on her, trapped by the nameless force
that lay behind her triviality, her daring commonness.

She rose to go at last.

"And you take him with you, _Monsieur le docteur_. If 'e sit many more
nights in ze front row 'e find out, too, I can't dance, and then I break
my 'eart. Besides, I 'ave my reputation to think of in this ver'
propaire England, _hein_?"

"I'm coming with you," Cosgrave said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulder.

"_Eh bien_, what can I do? They are all ze same. Good-bye, _Monsieur le
docteur_. You scare me stiff. But I like you. Nest time I 'ave ze
tummy-ache I ring you up.

"I shouldn't--if I were you."

"Why? You give me poison, p'raps?"

"I might," he said.

II

1

So Rufus Cosgrave disappeared, like an insignificant chip of wood
sucked into a whirlpool, and this time Stonehouse made no attempt to
plunge in after him. With other advanced and energetic men of his
profession he stood committed to a new enterprise--the creation of a
private hospital, which was to be a model to the hospitals of the
world--and he had no time to waste on a fool who wanted to ruin
himself. But though he never thought of Cosgrave, he could not
altogether forget him. At night he found himself turning instinctively
towards the window where the delicate, rather plaintive profile had
shown faintly against the glow of the streets, and