conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,

"Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gurnard."

As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making toward her--a deliberate, slow
progress. She greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes, a woman
greets a man she knows intimately. I found myself hating him, thinking
that he was not the sort of man she ought to know.

"It's settled?" she asked him, as he came within range. He looked at me
inquiringly--insolently. She said, "My brother," and he answered:

"Oh, yes," as I moved away. I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes
off him and her. I went and stood against the mantel-piece. The Duc de
Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw
that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of
flourishes as irritating as Gurnard's nonchalance.

I stood there and glowered at them. I noted her excessive beauty; her
almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two
men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no
thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of
conversation--she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely _empressé_,
Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly
vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that--there
was something ... something. I could not quite make out his face, I
never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise
hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a
man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been,
with him and with a fool like de Mersch--I should have been afraid.