"She's all right. Otherwise I didn't think it was very lively."
"N-no. It was hardly one of our best evenings," Marie admitted reluctantly.
It hadn't been—that first meeting of her circle after Arthur Lisle's dinner party. They had all been there, including Raymond, whose exchanges of wit and chaff with Joe Halliday were generally of themselves enough to make the evening a success. It had not been a success—at least from the moment of Arthur's arrival. Mildred Quain had started off about the party at once; her curiosity concerning the Norton Wards was insatiable—she seemed to be working up a regular cult of them. Marie herself had been benevolently inquisitive too, hoping to hear that Arthur had had a grand time and made a great impression. But the topic had seemed distasteful to Arthur, he tried to get away from it directly; when the persevering Mildred dragged him back, his replies grew short and his manner reserved; he seemed ill at ease. As for Sidney Barslow, as soon as ever Arthur and his party came on the scene, he turned sulky—indecently sulky. It was painful as well as absurd, and it got worse when Joe Halliday, trying (in justice let it be said) to lighten the atmosphere by jocularity, suggested, "And, after it all, I suppose some beautiful lady took you to your humble home in her six-cylinder car?" Arthur answered dryly, with a pointed ignoring of the joke, "I walked home by Oxford Street." Joe, still persevering, asked, "No romantic adventures on the way?" "Nothing out of the common," Arthur replied in a cool hard voice which was very rare in his mouth, but meant, Marie knew, serious displeasure. In fact she was just going to make some laughing apology for the catechism through which he had been put when Sidney Barslow, who had been glowering worse and worse every minute, suddenly broke out:
"There's an end of the thing, at all events, at last!" And he looked at Arthur, as it seemed to her, with a curious mixture of anger and fear, a sort of snarling defiance.
"It was not I who introduced the subject or was responsible for its continuance," said Arthur, in the iciest of all his cool voices. "That you must do me the justice to admit, Barslow."
Then an awful pause—even Joe gravelled for a joke—and the most obvious clumsy resort to "a little more music"! The strains failed of soothing effect. On the one side a careful but disdainful courtesy, on the other a surly defiance—they persisted all the evening, making everybody uncomfortable and (as Marie shrewdly guessed) inquisitive. This was something much worse, much more pronounced, than mere 'grating.' There was, on Sidney's side at least, an actual enmity; and Arthur, noting it, treated it with contemptuous indifference.
"Have you had a row with Sidney about anything?" she managed to whisper to Arthur.
"No."
"Have you said anything to annoy him, do you think?"
He looked straight into her eyes. "I haven't spoken to him since we were last here."