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Looking back upon the four years since Chloe Fairmile had thrown him over, it seemed to him that, in some ways, he had made a good job of his life, and, in others, a bad one. As to the money, that was neither here nor there. It had been amusing to have so much of it; though of late Daphne's constant reminders that the fortune was hers and not his, had been like grit in the mouth.
Then, at a pause, she lifted a careless hand, inquiring whether "the Fragonard sketch" opposite were not the pendant of one she named it at Berlin. "Ah-h-h!" said Mrs. Fairmile, with a smiling shake of the head, "how clever of you! But that's not a Fragonard. I wish it were. It's an unknown. Dr. Lelius has given him a name."
And she and Lelius fell into a discussion of the drawing, that soon left Daphne behind. Native taste of the finest, mingled with the training of a lifetime, the intimate knowledge of collections of one who had lived among them from her childhood these things had long since given Chloe Fairmile a kind of European reputation.
"I told you this morning. I had a run with the Stoneshire hounds." "Whom did you meet there?" "Oh, various old acquaintances. Nobody amusing." He gave two or three names, his conscience pricking him. Somehow, at that moment, it seemed impossible to mention Chloe Fairmile.
Daphne stumbled after her, consumed with angry envy, the précieuse in her resenting the easy mastery of Mrs. Fairmile, and the wife in her offended by the strange beauty, the soft audacities of a woman who had once, it seemed, held Roger captive, and would, of course, like to hold him captive again.
Roger began a sentence to the effect that if Fairmile had no scruples of his own, Chloe would scarcely have taught him any; but he checked himself abruptly in the middle, and the two men passed to other topics. French began to talk of East London, and the parish he was to have there. Roger, indifferent at first, did not remain so.
Fairmile, too, smiled; Roger had grown rather hot; and the Duchess was frankly annoyed. "I surrender it to force majeure," she said, as Daphne took it from her. "Why are we not all Americans?" And then, leaning back in her chair, she would talk no more. The pleasure of the visit, so far as it had ever existed, was at an end. But before the Barnes motor departed homewards, Mrs.
Fairmile had again found means to carry Roger Barnes out of sight and hearing into the garden. Roger had not been able to avoid it; and Daphne, hugging the leather case, had, all the same, to look on. When they were once more alone together, speeding through the bright sunset air, each found the other on edge. "You were rather rough on the Duchess, Daphne!" Roger protested.
She had ordered it in a mood of jealous annoyance because of a few pages of art criticism in it by Mrs. Fairmile, which impertinently professed to know more about the Vitali Signorelli than its present owner did; but she remembered also an article on "The Future for Women," which had seemed to her a fine, progressive thing.
"Moderately!" she said, with a smile, the colour rising in her cheek as she became aware, without looking at them, that Roger and Mrs. Fairmile had adjourned to the farther end of the large room, leaving her to the Duchess and Lelius. The small eyes above the Duchess's prominent nose sparkled. "Only moderately?" The speaker's tone expressed that she had been for once taken by surprise.
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