"You have no regrets?"

Again she laughed.

"Regrets?" she echoed. "What are they? One doesn't think about such
things, nowadays."

They stood quite still in the centre of that very handsome apartment.
They were almost alien figures in the world in which they moved,
Carraby, the rankest of newcomers, carried into political life by his
wife's ambitions, his own self-amassed fortune, and a sort of subtle
cunning--a very common substitute for brains; Mrs. Carraby, on whom had
been plastered an expensive and ultra-fashionable education, although
she was able perhaps more effectually to conceal her origin, the
daughter of a rich Yorkshire manufacturer, who had secured a paid
entrance into Society. They were purely artificial figures for the very
reason that they never admitted any one of these facts to themselves,
but talked always the jargon of the world to which they aspired, as
though they were indeed denizens therein by right. At that moment,
though, a single natural feeling shook the man, shook his faith in
himself, in life, in his destiny. There was Jewish blood in his veins
and it made itself felt.

"Mabel," he began, "this man Portel--you've flirted with him, you say?"

"I have most certainly flirted with him," she admitted quietly.

"He hasn't dared--"