Chapter XVII

Jimmy was a good host, and he waited patiently while Kitty examined the nectarines. There was not much to choose between the solid pink and yellow globes hanging on the south wall of the greenhouse. The sun had burned its own color into them; the air was warm and full of the heavy scent of flowers and ferns producing artificially their precocious, unseasonable life.

Kitty took a long time choosing her nectarine. She was not quite sure what line to take with Jimmy. He had the peculiar shutdown look of a man whose nerves are being subjected to strain, and who has made up his mind to keep all possible approaches to them closed. He was not thinking of his greenhouse, and he wanted to get back to his wife.

Kitty chose her fruit at last, and strolled in silence out into the kitchen garden. There was a seat opposite a bed of pansies, on which she sat down. The bright upturned faces of the pansies stared at the sun; bees pushed their slow way above them to a cloud of feathery larkspur. In the elms beyond the paddock the rooks were cawing their wrangling pathway home to bed.

Kitty took out a cigarette and looked up thoughtfully at Jimmy.

“It’s rather nice for men,” she observed, “being able to be rude comfortably. We can’t, you know; we have to put ourselves out and make conversation and hold on to the appearance of things. I don’t know why, but we do. If you were in my garden now, I should have to look pleasant and find you a match. This dress has no pockets.”

Jimmy handed her his box, reluctantly.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking over her head. “I think I’m quite polite enough; I brought you here.”

“Of course I’m awfully grateful for that,” agreed Kitty, “though I’m not at all sure whether you could help it. Your mother-in-law would have been so surprised if you’d said: ‘Hanged if I give you a nectarine! Go home, and be damned to you!’ By the by, are you afraid I’m going to make love to you, Jimmy? You look rather like one of those old Johnnies who thought they ought to resist visions and started to put the visions off by making themselves look as disagreeable as possible. I never thought it was a good plan, really; it must have put the visions on their mettle.”

“I don’t care whether you try or not,” said Jimmy, untruthfully. “It doesn’t make the least odds to me what you think you’re doing.”

Kitty laughed a little under her breath.

“You’d sound safer if you weren’t so sure,” she murmured. “However, if it’s any comfort to you, I’m _not_ going to make love to you. It would take such a long time and be such an effort, and might not be worth it even if I succeeded. I’m going to make you furious instead. You are cross already, so it won’t be so much trouble. What do you say to my marrying Tony? I’ve got a fancy for Pannell.”

Jimmy tried to look as if he didn’t believe her; but his eyes ceased to measure the new asparagus bed, and came back hurriedly to Kitty’s upturned face.

She looked as blandly innocent as the pansies at her feet.

“Yes,” she said consideringly, “that would make me a kind of roundabout sister-in-law to you, wouldn’t it? How would you like that?”

“I shouldn’t like it at all,” said Jimmy, coldly; “but I’m not sure even _that_ would be sufficient inducement to you to do it. Why do you want Pannell, which you wouldn’t get in any case for many years? You aren’t usually so mercenary.”

“Nobody’s mercenary when they have enough money,” said Kitty, “but all really careful people lay up a pear for their thirst. Pannell’s a nice fat pear, and at present I’m intolerably short and by and by I shall probably be thirsty.”

“I’d rather give you two or three hundred,” said Jimmy after a pause.

“Thanks,” said Kitty, puffing at her cigarette and watching his face with obvious enjoyment. “But I don’t want a tip. I’d like something solid in the funds, and I wouldn’t even mind a husband. This kind of thing you know—” she waved her cigarette in the direction of the low-browed house and the distant lawn—“rather brings up the subject of family life in an attractive light. All husbands aren’t cross, and it isn’t always Sunday.”

“You can’t marry Anthony,” said Jimmy, doggedly. “If he knew what I know about you, he wouldn’t do it, you see.”

“But he doesn’t, you see,” mocked Kitty, with a malicious little laugh.

“If you were to insist on marrying him,” said Jimmy, quietly, “I should have to tell him.”

Kitty blinked and screwed her wicked eyelashes together.

“You’re a brave man, Jimmy,” she said, “but I shouldn’t advise it. If you dot Tony’s i’s for him, I shall dot Daphne’s, and it isn’t the moment I’d choose for Daphne’s.”

Jimmy had been expecting this thrust. He took it outwardly coolly, but inwardly he had only one conscious feeling—a desire to kill Kitty at once and with his hands. He kept quite still; the murmuring low voices of the bees and the far-off, distracted cawings of the rooks were the only sounds in the world.

Kitty read murder in his eyes and enjoyed the sensation. If there was a moment in Kitty’s life that she really prized above all others it was the instant when, sailing close up to the wind, she ran a perceptible chance of being capsized by it.

She had this moment now, it passed as suddenly as she faced it. Jim drew a long breath, and put his hands in his pockets.

“You could do that, of course,” he said carefully, “if you were cad enough.”

“Any one who tells is a cad,” said Kitty, calmly, “and we should both of us have beautiful motives. At least yours would be beautiful, and mine would be reasonable; it is always reasonable to pay back a hit if one can. Still, I grant it would be better not to begin. You see, they both know a certain amount already, and it wouldn’t be particularly reassuring to know more.”

“Rather than let Tony marry you, I’d tell them both—everything,” said Jimmy, sternly.

Kitty laughed out suddenly.

“Here is Tony,” she said, rising to her feet. “I only wanted you to wait here with me till he came after us. I don’t intend to marry him. As you wouldn’t flirt, I had to think of something to amuse you to fill up the time.

“Hullo, Tony. Jimmy and I have been having such an awfully funny talk—what they call in the newspapers ‘a grave moral issue.’ You’ll be glad to hear Jimmy chose the truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in spite of the most fearful penalties attached to it. Only, as I was pulling his leg all the time, there won’t be any penalties. You can get off scot-free with your virtue, Jimmy.”

Jimmy said something under his breath and turned to escape, but Kitty checked him.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “I’m going to make you feel perfectly comfortable first by way of reward. Tony, he’s afraid you’ll marry me, but you won’t, will you, when you know he’s been one of my lovers? I told you once I tried to turn his head, but I didn’t tell you I _had_ turned it.”

Jimmy’s self-control left him. He swore savagely at Kitty, and at the name he called her by Anthony sprang forward and struck him.

Jimmy struck back, and for a minute or two Kitty watched them with interested approval. She had seen men fight for her before and she had never interfered. Then she saw that Anthony was getting the worst of it. Jimmy was stronger and heavier, and he was, if anything, the angrier; the weight of the anger he felt for Kitty got behind his mounting rage with Anthony. He might have forgiven Anthony’s blow if it had been the only one.

Kitty deliberately shut down the rose-pink parasol and drove it between the combatants. They started back for an instant, and in that instant she had slipped between them, the broken sunshade in her hands.

“Go to Daphne, Jim,” she said over her shoulder. “She may come along here at any moment and see you. You don’t want to upset her; leave Tony to me.”

Jimmy obeyed her without looking at her.

“You’d better sit down,” Kitty said to Anthony. Her eyes softened for a moment as they rested on him. “You shouldn’t fight when you’re so out of condition,” she added.

Anthony shook his head vehemently.

“Is what you said true?” he demanded.

“Yes,” said Kitty, “it was true. That’s what annoys Jim so. Men are so silly! What’s the use of being annoyed over ancient history? Besides, he’s perfectly safe now; Daphne’ll look after him. Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m afraid I’m silly, too,” said Anthony stiffly. “If what you said is true, I can’t stand it either, Kitty.”

Kitty nodded; she had not meant Anthony to stand it.

“All right,” she said; “I told you before that it was better you should go away. Thank you for trying to knock Jimmy down.”

Anthony hesitated a moment.

“Why did you tell me?” he asked her at last. “You needn’t have told me; I would never have guessed it.”

“I don’t know,” said Kitty; “I suppose I got bored and wanted to stir things up. Everybody looks so comfortable here, all primed with tea and the ten commandments. I just wanted to show that they aren’t as solid as they look. Besides, Jim is really rather trying just now; he thinks being happy is a virtue which he’s hit on for himself. I can’t stand people who are righteous about their luck.”

“I haven’t got that virtue,” said Anthony in a low, unsteady voice, “and it’s me you’ve really hit, Kitty. Jimmy won’t care.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh, you’re just as bad,” she said without looking at him; “you belong to the same lot, you’re one of the solid people. Nothing can really get hold of you and break you up.” Her voice caught for a moment. “I wish you’d go away. I hate the lot of you.”

Anthony took a step toward her. For a moment he thought of her and not of the pain she was causing him. It seemed to him as if Kitty was, absurdly enough, the victim and not the destroyer; but there was no yielding in Kitty to respond to his instinct. Her chin was up, and her eyes, as hard as pebbles, met his unflinchingly.

“Don’t you _see_,” she said fiercely, “that I’m simply _bored_ by you?”

And Anthony, struck to the heart, believed that she was simply bored, and left her.