it his lip with quick displeasure; she was merely eccentric, then,
not naive. For like every other man Roger detested eccentric women. It
has always been a marvel to me that women of distinct brain capacity
so almost universally fail to realise that we like you better
fashionable, even, than eccentric. You do not understand why, dear
ladies: you think it must be that we prefer fashion to brains, but
indeed it is not so. It is because to be fashionable is for you to be
normal, at least, that we tolerate your sheeplike marches and
counter-marches across the plain of society.

"Where do you dine when you dine out?" he inquired coldly, to trap her
at last into some explanation.

"On the rocks," she answered serenely, "or under the trees. Sometimes
on the sand close to the water. I like it better than in the house."

Roger experienced a ridiculous sense of relief.

"Do you dine alone?" he asked and she answered quietly,

"Of course. My father always ate by himself, and Hester, too. Caliban
will never let anyone see him eat: I have often tried, but he hides
himself."

The waiter brought them at this point an ivory-white salad of _endive_
set with ruby points of beet, drenched in pure olive-oil, and of this
soothing luxury Margarita consumed two large plates in dreamy silence.

"I like this food," she remarked at last, "I like it better than
Hester's."

Roger grew literally warm with satisfaction. He was still smiling when
she spooned out a great mouthful of the delicate ice before her and
under his amazed eyes set her teeth in it.

The horror of that humiliating scene woke him, years afterward,
through more than one clammy midnight. In one second the peaceful
dining-room was a chattering, howling reign of terror. For Margarita,
with a choking cry of rage and anguish, threw the ice with terrible
precision into the bland face of the waiter who had brought it; threw
her glass of water with an equal accuracy into the wide-open eyes of
the head waiter, who appeared instantly; threw Roger's wine-glass full
into his own horrified face as he rose to catch her death-dealing
hand, and lifting with the magnificent single-armed sweep of a Greek
war-goddess her chair from behind her, stood facing them, glaring
silently, a slate-eyed Pallas gloriously at bay!

The red wine poured down Roger's face like blood; the force of the
blow nearly stunned him, but by a supreme effort he bit furiously at
his tongue and the pain steadied h