“It isn’t that, quite,” she corrected him, her eyebrows puckering. “But he made me feel that I was of no importance whatsoever, and, being a woman, I resented it. He brushed me aside, like the sentry.”

“He was probably shy,” her companion suggested, for conciliation was his métier. “And of course he must have been tired after that long ride.”

“No,” she said, as they entered the ballroom, “I don’t think he was in the least bit shy; and, as for being tired, could anything make a man of that kind tired? He looks like a Hercules, or a Samson, or something unconquerable of that sort.”

Rupert Helsingham glanced quickly at her. There was a tone in her voice which suggested that their visitor’s personality had at once imposed itself on her mind. Women, he understood, were often attracted by masculine strength and brutality. He had known cases where an assumption of prehistoric manners had been eminently successful in the seduction of the weaker sex, painfully more successful, indeed, than had been his own well-bred dalliance with romance.

A school-friend had told him once that no girl could resist the man who took her by the throat, or pulled back her head by the hair, or, better still, who picked her up in his arms and bit her in the neck. He wondered whether Lady Muriel was heavy, and, with a sort of timorous audacity, he asked himself whether she would be likely to enjoy being bitten. He would have to be careful of Daniel Lane: he did not want any rivals.

She led him across to the three elderly ladies. He was her partner also for the present dance; but Muriel, throwing herself into a chair beside Lady Smith-Evered, told him that she would prefer not to take the floor. He glanced at the forbidding aspect of the three, and admired what he presumed to be her self-sacrifice in the interests of diplomacy.

“Rupert, my dear,” said the General’s wife, “do be an angel and bring us some ices.”

“What a willing little fellow he is,” murmured Mrs. Froscombe, as he hurried away on his errand, and there was a tone of derision in her voice.

“He’s always very helpful,” Lady Smith-Evered retorted, somewhat sharply, for he was her pet.

“I think he’s a dear,” said Muriel. “Nice manners are a tremendous asset. I hate churlishness.”

“I think you seldom meet with churlishness in Englishmen,” remarked Madam Pappadoulopolos. Her husband 

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