Jack started up, black and angry, and stood towering over the other.
"Do you think you can speak to me like that?" he said, very quietly.
For the moment Silly Billy expected to find himself on the floor, but not an eyelash quivered. He lounged against the chimney-piece, and flickered his cigarette-ash into the grate.
"If you touch me, you will be sorry for it," he said. "If you say another offensive word to me, you will be sorry for it. I am not in the slightest degree afraid of you. If you had been faithful to your wife, I should say your behaviour was admirable. As it is, it is merely childish. We are rotten folk, you and I; but I have the pull over you because I am not a hypocrite about it. Well, I don't want to call you names. I had better get back, had I not? The hand must be over, and they will be waiting for me."
"Certainly, if you have anything agreeable to say," remarked Billy. "For myself, I have done. And it was rather a weak no-trump. Wonder what my partner had?"
"I probably shall, when I get back," conceded Silly Billy. "What do you want to say?"
"This only: We are rotten people, and I have got to think it all over."
"Oh, yes; that's all right enough," he said. "Not coming back, I suppose, are you?"
He sauntered back into the card-room, where the hand was only just over.
"Well, what luck?" he asked. "Whisky-and-soda, waiter."
"Enormous. Two tricks did you say, partner? Thanks. Game, and twenty-four to nothing. How were aces? I only had one."
Jack heard the door of the card-room shut behind Silly Billy, and went slowly down-stairs and out into the hot, crowded thoroughfare. He was still almost powerless to believe in his own impotency, which had been so trenchantly put before him by that gentleman. Half a dozen times he wished himself back in the card-room, or in the other room where their interview had taken place, in order to have the opportunity again of knocking him down or throwing the cards in his face. Yet, so he told himself, that which seemed reasonable to him before would seem reasonable to him again. There was no flaw, so far as he could see, in the deductions which had been put before him, and he was utterly at a loss as to what he should do. The story, he knew well, would be all over London by to-morrow, for when a thing is talked about at a club, as quite assuredly this would be, there is no more stopping it than there is stopping the flight of Time by holding back the hands of a clock. It would assume protean and monstrous forms; but whatever form it assumed, his imagination could not picture one in which his own part could be construed as creditable. What account would Silly Billy give of the interview? A true one, probably, because, from his point of view, it could not be bettered. "Oh, he was violent at first; but I put before him the exact consequences of further violence, and he saw it at once." That would be quite sufficient, and he could almost hear Silly Billy saying it. But paramount in his mind was anger against Marie, for to that class of mind to which Jack's belonged a wife cannot conceivably do anything more awful than get herself talked about. He would have been perfectly indulgent, so he very kindly told himself, to anything she might do but that. That Mildred had been, and probably now was, talked about in connection with him did not concern him, for he was not her husband. To Jack's way of thinking, a flawless reputation was the monopoly of one person, namely, his wife.