It was a detestable situation, and I was completely floored by it for the moment. We were not half-way through lunch, and I felt that I could not endure to sit there for another twenty minutes, avoided, proscribed, held fast in a pillory, a butt for the sneers of any fool at the table. On the other hand, if I got up and marched out of the room, I should be acknowledging my defeat--and my guilt of whatever crime I was supposed to have committed. If I ever wished to justify my perfect innocence, I should forfeit my chances, at once, by accepting the snub I had received. To do that would be to acknowledge my sense of misbehaviour.
I leaned a little forward and glanced at Miss Tattersall who was sitting just beyond Nora Bailey on my side of the table. And I saw that my late confidante, the user of keyholes, was faintly smiling to herself with an unmistakable air of malicious satisfaction.
I wished, then, that I had not looked. I was no longer quite so conscious of outraged innocence. It is true that I was guiltless of any real offence, but I saw that the charge of complicity with the chauffeur--a charge that had certainly not lost in substance or in its suggestion of perfidy by Miss Tattersall's rendering--was one that I could not wholly refute. I was in the position of a man charged with murder on good circumstantial evidence; and my first furious indignation began to give way to a detestable feeling of embarrassment, momentarily increased by the necessity to sit in silence while the inane chatter of the luncheon table swerved past me. If I had had one friend with whom I could have talked, I might have been able to recover myself, but I defy any one in my situation to maintain an effective part with no active means of expression.
I glanced a trifle desperately at Olive Jervaise. I judged her to be rather a colourless creature who would not have the spirit openly to snub me. She was nearly opposite to me, between her brother and Hughes, and well placed for an open attack if I could once engage her attention. But when I came to consider an opening, every reasonably appropriate topic seemed to have some dangerous relation to the _affaire Brenda_. Any reference to the dance, to the Sturtons, the place, the weather, suddenly assumed in my mind the appearance of a subtle approach to the subject I most wished to avoid. If I was, indeed, regarded in that house as a spy in league with the enemy, the most innocent remark might be construed into an attempt to obtain evidence.