"He's rather amusing," Vivien ventured, not quite sure whether the adjective were respectful enough.
"Andy, pronounce!" cried Harry Belfield; for his friend sat in his usual meditative absorbing silence.
"If I had to, I'd like to say a word from the point of view of the—swine." Had the moon been stronger, he might have been seen to blush. "I don't want to be—oh, well, serious. That's rot, I know—after dinner. But—well, you're all in it—insiders—I'm an outsider. And I say that what the swine want is—pearls!"
"If we've got them?" The question, or insinuation, was Belfield's. He was looking at Andy with a real, if an only half-serious, interest.
"Swine are swine," remarked Wellgood. "They mustn't forget it. Neither must we."
"But pearls by no means always pearls?" Belfield suggested. "Though they may look the real thing if a pretty woman hangs them round her neck."
Their talk went only for an embellishment of their general state—so comfortable, so serene, so exceptionally fortunate. Were not they pearls? Andy had seen something of the swine, had perhaps even been one of them. A vague protest stirred in him; were they not too serene, too comfortable, too fortunate? Yet he loved it all; it was beautiful. How many uglies go to make one beautiful? It is a bit of social arithmetic. When you have got the result, the deduction may well seem difficult.
"It doesn't much matter whether they're real or not, if a really pretty woman hangs them round her neck," Harry laughed. "The neck carries the pearls!"
"But we'd all rather they were real," said Isobel Vintry suddenly, the first of the women to intervene. "Other women guess, you see."
"Does it hurt so much if they do?" Belfield asked.