“Favourite trick of hers,” he explained morosely. “Always tries to act as though she wasn’t dumb. If you had to live with that silly pretence it would get on your nerves, I can tell you. She does it very well, I admit. Takes a pride in it--making a fool of other people, I call it. On board ship from New York she put it over quite a number of people for a day or two. Lord, it would have got on any one’s nerves, the way she grinned and grinned and showed her teeth! Why not be honest and say one’s dumb and be done with it? Or let me say it! There’s no crime in being dumb, especially with a beautiful face like that. But she won’t see it, she must smile and flash her teeth--she’s got a repertoire of grins that would astonish a movie star; and she’s so proud of them that even if she could speak she wouldn’t. And sometimes all that grinning and toothwork gets me so raw that I could put back my head and howl--and she knows it. Sorry I offended you, George. But I’m nervy these days. I’m raw--_raw_!” He shouted that last word at us with a thump on the table; and raw he looked, with the eyes blazing out of him, and his once huge, once red, once jolly face shrunk to a mockery of itself, with the skin drawn tight across his jaws and hollow in the cheeks. Tarlyon picked up a liqueur-glass which the thump had upset. “Sorry about your unhappy marriage, Antony,” he said, “but, you know, it takes a Napoleon to marry a beautiful Creole. How did it happen?” “How?” And Antony laughed; at least he made a noise which was perhaps intended to sound like laughter. “How? Because she made it happen--how else? D’you think because she’s dumb that she hasn’t got more fascination than a thousand women rolled together? Those eyes? Met eyes like that before, George? If hell has a face its eyes will be like that. I _had_ to marry her.... In Mexico where I went after the Armistice. I suppose you fellows remember that I went to Mexico three years before the war. I was in love with the girl who became Roger’s wife--inevitable, wasn’t it, that the only woman I ever loved should fall to Roger? He didn’t do it on purpose, of course--it just happened. So I went to Mexico, to try to do something which Roger could not do before me. Last chance kind of thing, you know----” The rain of words faded out of him. He had moved considerably from the subject of Diavalen, but who could hold a haunted face like that to a subject? I wished I could, for I didn’t want him to run amok about Roger. There was something--well, indecent, in talking about a man dead nine years or more as though he were alive and still wanting to “put it across” Antony at every turn. I wished Tarlyon would say something, but he was silent, his fingers fiddling with the stem of his port-glass. Antony was drinking next to nothing; round about his coffee-cup were at least six quarter-smoked cigarettes, and now he began to maul a cigar. I never saw him smoke that cigar.