"The only thing that really does hurt," Isobel assured him, smiling.
"Oh, my dear, how disproportionate!" sighed Mrs. Belfield.
"I'd never have anything false about me—pearls, or lace, or hair, or—or anything about me," exclaimed Vivien. "I should hate it!" Feeling carried her into sudden unexpected speech.
Very gradually, very tentatively, Andy was finding himself able to speak in this sort of company, to speak as an equal to equals, not socially only, but in an intellectual regard.
"Riches seem to me all wrong, but what they produce, leaving out the wasters, all right." He let it out, apprehensive of a censuring silence. Belfield relieved him in a minute.
"I'm with you. I always admire most the things to which I'm on principle opposed—a melancholy state of one's mental interior! Kings, lords, and bishops—crowns, coronets, and aprons—all very attractive and picturesque!"
"We all know that the governor's a crypto-Radical," said Harry.
"I thought Carlyle, among others, had taught that we were all Radicals when in our pyjamas—or less," said Belfield. "But that's not the point. The excellence of things that are wrong, the narrowness of the moral view!"
"My dear! Oh, well, my dear!" murmured Mrs. Belfield.
"I've got a touch of asthma—I must say what I like." Belfield humorously traded on his infirmity. "A dishonest fellow who won't pay his tradesmen, a flirtatious minx who will make mischief, a spoilt urchin who insists on doing what he shouldn't—all rather attractive, aren't they? If everybody behaved properly we should have no 'situations.' What would become of literature and the drama?"