"You can jeer at me all you like. I am perfectly happy to enter the arena and do my best—win, lose, or draw. If my loss gives you pleasure, you are welcome to it!" He ignored the indrawn breath around the table and the looks of amazement. "But I am deeply offended by your making a public joke out of the death of a young woman whose only sin, so far as we know, was to be denied the opportunity to study or to practice her art so long as we knew she was a woman and not a man. She deceived us because we deserved it—in fact, in a sense demanded it."

He disregarded Lofthouse's rising anger or Colonel Weatherall's incredulity, even his host's embarrassment "And to suggest that the buildings are worth less because they were designed by a woman rather than a man is the utmost hypocrisy. You know nothing more or less about them now than you did last week, when you were full of praise. They look exactly the same, your knowledge of their design and construction and material is exactly what it was before. You marveled yesterday, and today you mock, and nothing is different except your perception of the personal rife of the architect."

"Rathbone, I really think..." Laurence protested.

Lofthouse was red in the face. He half rose to his feet, hands on the white tablecloth.

Rathbone rose also.

"You say a young woman cannot do such things," he continued, his tone even more penetrating. "Therefore what she does must be worthless, and what she had done must be worthless because she is a young woman. Actually, she was nearly forty." His voice dripped sarcasm. "But no doubt where age matures a man it merely dulls a woman. I cannot think even you can seriously believe such an argument. You are a hypocrite, and it is bigots like you who drive genius to destruction, because you don't understand it, and what you don't understand you destroy."

He had gone too far, and he knew it even as he was speaking, not that he did not mean it, but he should not have said it. He stared at their shocked faces. He should apologize, at least to Laurence. Perhaps he would tomorrow, or next week, but not today. He was too passionately, irretrievably, angry.

"You're drunk!" Lofthouse accused him with amazement, then ruined the effect by hiccuping.

Rathbone looked at him, then at the half-empty glass beside him, with withering contempt.

There was nothing left for him to do but incline his head in the barest acknowledgment to Laurence, then excuse himself and leave.