She lifted Mrs. North, protesting shrilly, bodily out of her chair.
“My dear Violet! Don’t! Oh, my hat!” she cried, and retreated, like a ruffled bird, to the looking-glass over the mantelshelf to rearrange her plumage.
Violet seized her father by both hands and pulled him too out of his chair.
“Come and play a game of croquet with me before the guests come, Herr Professor,” she said.
It was her old name for him in the days when Karl von Schäde had brought many German expressions and titles into their midst. It struck North with a curious little unpleasant shock.
“Why have you put poor Dick’s photo up here?” asked his wife.
“Oh, do leave my things alone!” exclaimed North.
His wife’s capacity for discovering and inquiring into any little thing he did not want to explain was phenomenal. It irritated him to see her pick up the frame. It irritated him that she would always speak of his dead friend as “poor Dick.”
The atmosphere disturbed by Violet’s sudden radiant entrance became once more charged with electric irritation.
Mrs. North put down the frame with a little click.