Thank you for nothing! I didn’t come over here to be protected—I don’t need it. I can take care of myself. Just try to act and feel like a decent human being—let’s try to be friends together and to show some consideration for each other—and don’t worry about protecting me!”
LXXXI
He slept little that night. The quarrel in the night-club and its consequences seemed fantastic, incredible, like a nightmare. At daybreak he got up and went to the window and stared out at the grey light just breaking on the roofs and chimney-pots of Paris. The old buildings emerged haggard, pale, lemony, with all the wonderful, homely practicality of dawn and morning, and looking at them, Montmartre, the blaze of lights, the music and the drunken voices, and the quarrel with the Frenchman—the whole strange and evil chemistry of night—seemed farther away, more unreal and dream-like than ever. Could it have happened? Had Starwick really been challenged to a duel? Was he going through with it?
He got up and dressed, and with dry lips and a strange, numb lightness in his limbs, descended to the street and hailed a passing taxi in the Rue Bonaparte. The sounds of morning, shutters being rolled up, scrubwomen and maids down on their knees at entrances, shops being opened—all this made the night before seem more unreal than ever.
When he got to the studio he found everybody up. Ann was already at work making coffee, scrambling eggs for breakfast. Elinor was just combing up her hair, Starwick was in the balcony and had not yet come down. Elinor kept talking as she arranged her hair, and from the balcony Starwick answered her.
“But Frank!” she was saying, “you know you wouldn’t be fool enough to do such a thing! Surely you don’t mean you intend to go through with it?”
“Ace,” he said coldly from above, “I do mean to. Quite!”
“But—oh! Don’t be an ass!” she cried impatiently. Turning to Ann, with a little, frowning smile, she bit her lips, and shaking her head slightly, cried in an astounded tone:
“Isn’t it incredible! Did you ever hear of such an insane thing in all your life?”
But in the set of her jaw, the faint smile around the corner of her mouth, there was the look of grim decision they had all seen before.
As Eugene entered, Ann turned from the stove, and, spoon in hand, stood
