"Must be," assented Bob.
"It takes it out of her ever so much more with some people than with others," said Vera.
"Ah, it would," said Bob solemnly, shaking his head.
"I suppose complicated people are more wearing than the simpler kind," said Felicity. "There's more in them to find out."
"You mean it must have been pretty plain sailing with me?" said Henderson.
Here Wilton arrived.
"There's something about the tone of your delightful home to-day," he said as he greeted Vera, "that makes me feel curiously Oriental. I don't exactly know what it is, but I feel I want to sit down cross-legged on a mat and smoke a hookah. How do you account for it?"
"You 'hear the East a-calling,' and all that sort of thing," said Henderson, laughing. "Eh?"
"Yes. But perhaps after all it's only the east wind. No, it's the incense some one's been burning. At your shrine, of course, Mrs. Ogilvie. What a talent you have for creating the right atmosphere."
Vera was highly flattered.