VII

One Saturday there was a tennis party. Miss Leland devoted herself all day to a young Foreign Office clerk. She played tennis with him, talked with him, drank lemonade with him, had neither thoughts nor words for anyone else. John Sherman was quite happy. Tennis was always a bore, and now he was not called upon to play. It had not struck him there was occasion for jealousy.

As the guests were dispersing, his betrothed came to him. Her manner seemed strange.

‘Does anything ail you, Margaret?’ he asked, as they left the Square.

‘Everything,’ she answered, looking about her with ostentatious secrecy. ‘You are a most annoying person. You have no feeling; you have no temperament; you are quite the most stupid creature I was ever engaged to.’

‘What is wrong with you?’ he asked, in bewilderment.

‘Don’t you see,’ she replied, with a broken voice, ‘I flirted all day with that young clerk? You should have nearly killed me with jealousy. You do not love me a bit! There is no knowing what I might do!’

‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘it was not right of you. People might say, “Look at John Sherman; how furious he must be!” To be sure, I wouldn’t be furious a bit; but then they’d go about saying I was. It would not matter, of course; but you know it is not right of you.’

‘It is no use pretending you have feeling. It is all that miserable little town you come from, with its sleepy old shops and its sleepy old society. I would give up loving you this minute,’ she added, with a caressing look, ‘if you had not that beautiful bronzed face. I will improve you. To-morrow evening you must come to the opera.’ Suddenly she changed the subject. ‘Do you see that little fat man coming out of the Square and staring at me? I was engaged to him once. Look at the four old ladies behind him, shaking their bonnets at me. Each has some story about me, and it will be all the same in a hundred years.’

After this he had hardly a moment’s peace. She kept him continually going to theatres, operas, parties. These last were an especial trouble; for it was her wont to gather about her an admiring circle to listen to her extravagancies, and he was no longer at the age when we enjoy audacity for its own sake.