I never dreamed you'd bother with him seriously or I'd not have been so slow." Margaret was leaning back, looking up at him.

"I've sunk even lower than I thought," she said, bringing to an end the painful silence which followed this speech.
"What do you mean, Rita ?" She laughed cynically, shrugged her shoulders.

First, Craig's impudent assumption that she loved him, and his rude violation of her lips; now, this frank insolence of insult, the more savage that it was unconscious--and from the oldest and closest of her men friends.

If one did not die under such outrages, but continued to live and let live, one could save the situation only by laughing.

So, Margaret laughed--and Arkwright shivered.
"For God's sake, Rita!" he cried.