"You find the opportunities, I am sure, much more numerous than the importunities," he said, faint, yet pursuing. "Yes, champagne."
"And that's just beautifully put, Lord Abbotsworthy," said Mrs. Murchison.
The tide of conversation changed, and set to opposite sides. Toby and Lily alone refused to obey the action of the tide, as if they were a rebel moon, which demanded a system of its own, refusing allegiance elsewhere, and continued to talk, regardless of the isolated unit they left on each side of them. Mrs. Murchison, who liked the agreeable hovering of the mind over first one subject and then another, which reminded her, she said, of the way in which the puma birds in the Southern States sucked honey from various flowers without alighting, was instantly involved in a sort of double-barrelled conversation with Lord Comber about the check system of baggage, and the relative position of women in England and the United States of America.
As dinner went on conversation became louder and more desultory. No one listened particularly to what anyone else was saying; the tendency for everyone to talk at once (this may have been the tendency of the upper classes which Mrs. Murchison had inquired about) became more marked, and the inimitable atmosphere of laughter was abroad. At Kit's house everyone always left the dining-room together as soon as cigarettes were handed round, for her excellent social sense told her that when people were getting on well (and at her house they always did), it was absurd for a party to go through the refrigerating process of isolation of the sexes, and waste time in thawing again. Besides, she considered it obsolete for men to sit over wine; nobody ever drank now, it was only in England that so absurd a form was kept up.
Some of the party were going on to a vague elsewhere, and Mrs. Murchison's eye caught Lily's soon after ten. She was most anxious on this first occasion not to outstay her welcome.
"It's been just too charming, Lady Conybeare," she said; "but Lily and I must go. We've got to go here and there, on and on till morning."
Kit rose. Her plan was prospering, for Lily and Toby were still talking together, and she felt particularly pleased with herself and everybody else.
"Too unkind of you to go," she said; "and if you don't come to see us again very soon, now that you know the way, I shan't forgive you. Send me a line any day and come to lunch. I am almost always in for lunch. And has Toby been making himself pleasant, Miss Murchison? He can when he likes. I saw him shaking with laughter at something you were telling him at dinner, and I longed to shout across the table and ask what it was. Good-night! Too tiresome that you have to go! Conybeare and I are going to be very domestic this evening, and not set one foot out, but sit and play cat's-cradle together when the others have gone. Mind, I only let you go under the distinct understanding that you will come back very soon, unless we've bored you both beyond forgiveness."
Jack went down with them to the front-door, and Kit as far as the head of the stairs, where she kissed her hand and looked regretfully after them, with her head a little on one side. As she expected, Mrs. Murchison gave one backward glance as she went out, and Kit kissed her hand again, smiling. Then, as soon as the front-door closed, she hurried back in a brisk business-like manner to join the others.