Lionel laughed shyly.
“I shouldn’t have thought,” he said, “that Winn would need much more good.”
“Ah, my dear fellow!” said Winn’s voice behind him, “you don’t know how great my needs are. Sorry I couldn’t meet you.”
Estelle’s beautiful, wavering eyes rested for a moment on her husband. She had never known a man to dress so quickly, and it seemed to her an unnecessary quality.
The dinner was a great success. Both men were absurdly gay. Winn told good stories, laughed at Lionel, and rallied his young wife. She had never seen him like this before, and she put it down to the way one man sets off another.
Estelle felt that she was being a great success, and it warmed her heart. The two men talked for her and listened to her; she had a moment when she thought that perhaps, after all, she needn’t relegate Winn to a lower world.
They accepted with enthusiasm her offer to sing to them after dinner and then they kept her waiting in the drawing-room for an hour and a half.
She sat there opposite a tall Italian mirror, quivering with her power, her beauty, her ability to charm, and with nothing before her but the empty coffee-cups.
She played a little, she even sang a little (the house was small) to recall them to a sense of her presence, but inexplicably they clung to their talk. Winn who at ordinary times seemed incapable of more than disconnected fragments of speech was (she could hear him now and then quite distinctly) talking like a cataract; and Lionel was, if anything, worse. Her impatience turned into suspicion. Probably Winn was poisoning his friend’s mind against her. Perhaps he was drinking too much, Sir Peter did, and people often took after their fathers. That would have to be another point for Lionel and her to tackle. At last they came in, and Lionel said without any attempt at an apology:
“We should love some music, Mrs. Winn.”