She entered the room with perfect composure, wearing the same clothes that she had worn at the luncheon-party.
"Perhaps I shouldn't have come," she said, "but there are things I want to say. I want to know why you did that."
"You'll sit down, won't you?" said Garth. "What is it precisely we are talking about?"
"Why did you give that luncheon? Why did you make me come to it? I refused at first, you know. Then Mr Ferguson came to see me and persuaded me. He told me the Archdeacon was coming, and that seemed like a mutual acquaintance. I think if he had been there he wouldn't have been as rude to me as his wife was. I dare say, if I had told her I was a general servant, she would have been as sweet to me as she was to that half-drunken crossing-sweeper, or that Belgian brute, or some of the other people whom you ought not to have asked me to meet."
"Yes," said Mr Ferguson, cheerfully. "Lady Longshore also is very unconventional, isn't she?"
"I'm not speaking about that," said Miss Bostock, doggedly. "The rudeness of that lady to me is a small personal matter easily forgotten. It's the ghastly humiliation of the whole thing that makes me sick and savage."
There was a moment's silence. "Ferguson," said Garth, "there was that letter."
"Yes," said Ferguson, "I'll see to it," and passed out of the room.
"Now, then," said Garth. "What's the trouble, Miss Bostock?"
"The trouble is that the whole of us were merely a show got up for your amusement. You gave us a lunch that we might make fools of ourselves. Fish out of water are very absurd, aren't they? But it's cruel to take them out of water and to watch them dying, all the same. That luncheon-party was the most brutal thing done in London to-day, and you were the brute who did it. What harm was I doing? Why did you drag me into it?"