The waiter came in with tea. When he had gone, the Doctor could speak.
But he scarcely knew what to say. Very seldom was his self-possession disturbed. To-day he felt at a disadvantage. The depression, perhaps chiefly physical, which had lately been brooding over him, and which had become acute at the concert, deepened about him to-day, made him feel morally small. Mrs. Chepstow's cheerfulness seemed like height. For a moment in all ways she towered above him, and even her bodily height seemed like a mental triumph, or a triumph of her will over his.
She gave him his cup of tea, with the same gesture that had charmed Nigel on the day when he first visited her. Then she handed him a plate with little bits of lemon on it.
"I've found out your tastes, you see. I know you never take milk."
He was obliged to feel grateful. Yet something in him longed to refuse the lemon, the something that never ceased from denouncing her. He uttered the right banality:
"But you bother about me, and on your only free day! Don't you think I am grateful to you?"
There was no mockery in her voice. Today her irony was concealed, but, like a carefully-covered fire, he knew it was burning still. And because it was covered he resented it. He resented this comedy they were playing, the insincerity into which she was smilingly leading him. She could not imagine that she deceived him. She was far too clever for that. Then what was the good of it all?--that she had put him, that she kept him, at a disadvantage.
She handed him the muffins. She ministered to him as if she wanted to pet him. Again he had to feel grateful. Even in acute dislike men must be conscious of real charm in a woman. And Isaacson did not know how to ignore anything that was beautiful. Had the Devil come to him--with a grace, he must have thought, "How graceful is the Devil!" Now he was charmed by her gesture. Nevertheless, being a man of will, and, in the main, a man who was very sincere, he called up his hard resolutions, and said:
"No, I don't think you are grateful. I don't think you are the woman to be grateful without a cause."
She touched his sleeve. And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she could play upon the worst in him.