The bell rang for a division in the House. Several men got up and left the table to vote. Sophy glanced up vaguely a moment as they went out, then returned to her light chatter with Amaldi.
No one seemed to notice this particularly, or, if they did notice it, it was probable that they understood only too well the nervous excitement which led her to keep up this gay rattle as if not daring to pause.
Tyne understood perfectly. If he had twice attempted to break in on her talk with Amaldi it was only because he saw something very dangerous in the glances which her husband was beginning to cast at her.
Suddenly Chesney leaned his arms on the table, pushing the glasses to one side. He thrust forward his face in his wife's direction. It was livid. Moisture stood on his forehead. His eyes burned black. The people near him gazed appalled. It was not so much like a face as like a mask of hatred.
Several times Amaldi, who also had caught glimpses of this face, had tried to let the conversation drop naturally. Sophy had been talking steadily with him for at least fifteen minutes. But it was as if she were afraid to stop for a moment--like a nervous skater who knows that if she pauses she will fall.
And all at once it happened--the monstrous--the incredible thing.
What he had thought that she was saying, Sophy could never divine. Even long afterwards when she could think of it with comparative calmness, she could not imagine what he could have thought--or could she ever remember what it was that she had really been saying. But whatever it was, as the words came from her smiling lips, suddenly, barking it out at her, before that brilliant company, before some of the most famous men and women of the day--her husband called down the long table to her:
She was so startled--the thing was so incredible--that, thinking she had not heard aright, she turned towards him and said:
"I say you lied. What you said just now was a lie."
Then, his arms still on the table, his shoulders hunched, he began sipping a fresh glass of wine, staring moodily before him, with a sort of vacant, bovine ferocity in his fixed eyes.
Every one has noticed how some trivial fact always imprints itself indelibly on one's mind in such ghastly moments. Opposite Sophy sat the beautiful Duchess of Maidsdowne. As Chesney shouted his insult at his wife, the blood rushed in a scarlet wave to the roots of the Duchess's chestnut hair, and the lovely, violent crimson glowed, painfully over-brilliant, on her cheeks for the rest of the evening. This agonised blush was the one thing that Sophy could ever clearly recall of the moments that followed. All went black about her the next instant; then her will conquered, and she sat still, and conscious, but all that she was conscious of was that the Duchess of Maidsdowne had blushed crimson, and that this crimson still dyed her lovely face. Sophy had heard that she was consumptive and that she rouged to conceal her illness. Now she kept thinking, "No. She does not rouge. I must remember to tell Olive. She does not rouge at all. What a wonderful colour. And how it rushed up to the very edge of her hair."