Manvers laughed.
“I don’t mind your thinking me vicious,” he said. “I dare say I am vicious from your point of view, but you shouldn’t tell me so. It savours of Billingsgate, and it is quite clear without your telling me of it. You insult my intelligence when you say so.”
“In that I am sorry,” said Tom. “I never meant to do that. I wish you would leave your—well, your Muse alone, and come out.”
Manvers looked out of the window.
“I suppose I shall have to come,” he said. “But you are so violent, you never will consent to take carriage exercise. Luckily you can’t ask me to play outdoor games here, as there are no outdoor games to play. Dominoes is the only outdoor game I can play—I have done so outside French cafés. I’m afraid I can’t say it’s too cold.”
“I should insult your morality if you did,” said Tom.
“Well, that’s not so bad as insulting my intelligence.”
“And that is exactly where we differ,” said the other.
Arthur Wrexham was giving a small party the next evening, of a very recherché order, the dinner being served frothily in paper frills, shells, or on silver skewers, and the candles shaded in so cunning a manner that it was barely possible to see what the food was. He lived in a somewhat sumptuous set of rooms on the upper square of the town, and for a week or more, as the sirocco had been blowing, had been in a state of apparently irretrievable collapse.
A little balcony opening out of his dining-room overlooked the square, and as the night was very hot, the glass-door on to it was left open, and the noises of the town came up to the guests as they sat at dinner, like a low accompaniment to their own voices. It had been one of those days when the divine climate of Athens gives way to all the moods of an angry woman. The morning had dawned bright and hot, but before ten o’clock sirocco had sprung up, and whoso walks in the face of sirocco is bathed through and through in a fine white dust, most gritty. The sirocco had brought the clouds from seawards, and about one o’clock the rain came down, and laid the dust. Then the sun shone violently till nearly five, and the air was like to a sticky warm bath. Later on it had clouded over again, and Tom remarked in a pause in the conversation that it had begun to lighten.