"I met him at the theatre. He was the author of the play."

"The man you told me you had been talking to? The fellow who scraped
acquaintance with you between the acts?"

"But I found out he was an old friend. I mean, I knew him when I was
a child."

"You didn't tell me that,"

"I only found it out later."

"After he had invited you to supper! It's maddening!" cried Derek,
the sense of his wrongs surging back over him. "What do you suppose
my mother thought? She asked me who the man with you was. I had to
say I didn't know! What do you suppose she thought?"

It is to be doubted whether anything else in the world could have
restored the fighting spirit to Jill's cowering soul at that moment:
but the reference to Lady Underhill achieved this miracle. That deep
mutual antipathy which is so much more common than love at first
sight had sprung up between the two at the instant of their meeting.
The circumstances of that meeting had caused it to take root and
grow. To Jill Derek's mother was by this time not so much a fellow
human being whom she disliked as a something, a sort of force, that
made for her unhappiness. She was a menace and a loathing.

"If your mother had asked me that question," she retorted with spirit
"I should have told her that he was the man who got me safely out of
the theatre after you . . ." She checked herself. She did not want to