Was it just part of a social training that instinctively served her and would always serve her, or was it one way of protecting herself from facing a bitter truth? Did she always oppose the smooth, unreal self-effacement of the super-civilized to the onslaught of real emotion?
"There's a great deal in what you say, sir," he assured the General. "At the same time, Dev has done quite a lot for his own people according to his lights. I could tell you of instances——"
He noticed, with a pleasure that he felt to be rather irrational, that Valentine was not now seeking, as she had sought earlier in the evening, to avert the General's foolish spate of assertions and counter-assertions on the subject of Ireland.
She was leaving Lonergan to deal with them, taking for granted his ability to do so without discomfiture to himself—for she would never, he felt certain, run the risk of allowing a stranger to endure discomfiture.
He and she, however, were most certainly not strangers.
On that conviction, Lonergan let his analysis of the situation rest temporarily.
When dinner was over, and they had moved out of the cold dining-room to the comparative warmth of the hall, Primrose said to him curtly:
"Have you seen the room that's supposed to be your office?"
"Yes. I saw it for a minute before dinner. It seems charming."
"The fire is laid there," said Valentine, "if you'd like to use it to-night. Please do, if you want to."
"Thank you very much. Perhaps later on."
He found himself looking at her, gravely and with attention, and averted his gaze with a conscious effort.
It met, for once squarely and fully, a look from Primrose who was standing behind her mother.
She signalled to him, briefly and competently with a backward jerk of the head, that he should seek the little breakfast-room now to be his office, and that she would join him there.
Lonergan slightly shook his head. He gave her at the same time what he himself had candidly described to more than one lady of his intimate acquaintance as "a look that's as good as a declaration", with narrowed, smiling eyes and an almost imperceptible movement of the lips.
He wished, at the moment, neither to humiliate her nor to let her think that he had been antagonized by her behaviour at dinner.
It was not possible to tell how she reacted inwardly to his refusal. Her face remained a mask, with its look of embittered discontent that gave the impression of having been painted on.
But Primrose, he reflected, had the hard, genuine shrewdness of disillusioned youth and showed sometimes an unexpected and disconcerting degree of intuition.
"... late for the news," General Levallois was saying.
As Lonergan glanced at his watch, sure that it was a quarter of an hour too early for the Nine O'Clock News, the old spaniel and the puppy both broke into vehement barking, drowning the far-away jangle of the bell just as it became audible.
The General shouted a command at the dogs and Jess, shouting also, dominated all the clamour.
"I'll go!"
The spaniel flopped to the floor again, and the puppy pranced after Jessica to the front door.
"It must be Captain Sedgewick," said Valentine, and she stood up.
Lonergan, rising also, saw rather than heard the words "My God!" forming themselves on Primrose's lips.
She turned away and went through the door behind which, Lonergan knew already, was the telephone.
He heard the faint tinkle indicating that she had lifted off the receiver.
Valentine moved forward to meet the arrival. Jess could be heard talking to him with friendly, effortless enthusiasm.
"What the devil makes people turn up just when one wants to be listening to the news? Ought to have more sense," grumbled the General.
He looked across at Lonergan, who could almost see the thought, rising slowly in his mind that, give the devil his due, this Irish fellow hadn't done that.
With the nearest approach to cordiality that he had yet shown, General Levallois remarked:
"I think I'll listen to it in my own den. I don't know whether you'd care to come along—get out of this racket."
"Thanks very much indeed, sir, but I think perhaps, as Sedgewick knows I'm here——"
"Ah," said the General, "there's something in that, I daresay."
He reached for his sticks and hobbled off, with a not unfriendly "Good-night. Shan't be coming down again," and disappeared as the others returned.
Captain Sedgewick, whose physical type so unfailingly suggested a fox to Lonergan's imagination, was as cool, as unembarrassed and completely self-assured as his superior officer had always seen him.
He was an excellent soldier, better liked by his men than by his brother officers who knew him for a social climber.
A general conversation, polite and insignificant, followed.
Primrose made no return, until Valentine had offered to show Captain Sedgewick his room.
"I had four hours' sleep last night, and none the night before," he admitted, "so if I may, I'll say good-night. That is to say, unless you wanted me for anything to-night, sir," he added, addressing Lonergan. "I understand your office is here."
"I do not indeed. The office is still in the town; this is only an unofficial office, so to say, that Lady Arbell has been kind enough to put at my disposal up here."
The formality of his own speech rather amused Lonergan, inwardly. He knew that had he been either alone with Sedgewick, or alone with Valentine, he would have worded the phrase quite differently.
Unexpectedly, out of the blue, he felt himself seized by a sick impatience, directed against himself and his eternal readiness to say and to do the thing that was appropriate to the situation.
He wanted, suddenly and imperatively, simply to ask Valentine if she wouldn't come downstairs again and talk to him.
"Jess, if you're going up to see Madeleine, darling, ask her if she'll be kind and go through all Primrose's things to-morrow."
Valentine turned to Lonergan.
"I'll be down again presently, but you'll do just as you prefer about going up to bed, or writing or anything, won't you?"
"Thank you."
Jess said okay, cried a general good-night to everyone and stooped to pick up her dog.
It took her a long while to adjust aunt Sophy to any degree of submissive tranquillity and Lonergan watched her with unreflective amusement.
When at last she went up the curving stairway, he took out a cigarette and stood looking round for a spill.
Primrose, with her thick coat drawn on over her blue frock, was suddenly there, coming towards him—and Lonergan was actually startled as though she were someone from another world.
So, indeed, she was, but on the heels of that thought there came, clear and complete as the statement of a mathematical problem, his realization of the inevitable, complicated and difficult adjustment towards which they were moving.
The sound of her very first words told him that she was angry.
"It's been one hell of a lovely evening, hasn't it? What the devil's the matter with you, Rory?"
"I'm not sure."
If she wants a show-down, let her have it, he thought, making himself deliberately callous.
"Well, if you're not, I am. You're shocked, like the sentimentalist you are, because I'm