And surely--surely there must be some men who
prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--"
"Ulford, eh?" he interrupted.
The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme's temper. She forgot the
believers in the angel and the angel too.
"How dare you?" she exclaimed. "As if I--"
He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
returning.
"Good women don't do things like that," he said. "If it was known in
London you'd be done for."
"And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?"
"Men's different," he said.
The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment she
hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady Cardington
had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the Carlton after
Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch, and her sense of impotent fury was made more
bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that men should be
"different," or at least--if not that--had smilingly given them a license
to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that she said nothing.
Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever, almost intellectual.
This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him. An intoxication of
power surged up to his brain.
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