Breeding counts. Had he belonged to a lower order of society, Derek would probably have seized Jill by the throat and started to choke her. Being what he was, he merely received her with frozen silence and led her out to the waiting taxi-cab. It was only when the cab had started on its journey that he found relief in speech.
“Well,” he said, mastering with difficulty an inclination to raise his voice to a shout, “perhaps you will kindly explain?”
Jill had sunk back against the cushions of the cab. The touch of his body against hers always gave her a thrill, half pleasurable, half frightening. She had never met anybody who affected her in this way as Derek did. She moved a little closer, and felt for his hand. But, as she touched it, it retreated—coldly. Her heart sank. It was like being cut in public by somebody very dignified.
“Derek, darling!” Her lips trembled. Others had seen this side of Derek Underhill 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 the 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 soliloquizing. “I simply cannot understand you. After what happened before dinner tonight, 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 behavior 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 a fellow human being whom she disliked as a something, a sort of force, that made for her unhappiness. She was a menace and a loathing.
“If your mother had asked me that question,” she retorted with spirit “I should have told her that he was the man who got me safely out of the theatre after you —” She checked herself. She did not want to say the unforgiveable thing. “You see,” she said, more quietly, “you had disappeared. —”
“My mother is an old woman,” said Derek stiffly. “Naturally I had to look after her. I called to you to follow.”