“Dear boy, I am so sorry,” he said. “Pray, play your piece.”
“I can’t,” said Martin. “I don’t know it.”
For a moment father and son looked at each other, the one with surprise and indignation, the other in impetuous rebellion and anger.
“Lady Sunningdale asks you to play again what you were playing,” said his father, the desire to be sympathetic vanishing, the sternness deserved by this deplorable lack of manners in Martin increasing every moment.
“It is quite impossible that I should play it,” said Martin. “I couldn’t play a note of it.”
“You seemed to me to know it,” said Mr. Challoner. “Surely you have played it a hundred times at home.”
Martin was really incapable in the shock of this transition from the world which he loved and in which he was at home to this other world of decent behaviour.
“More like a thousand times,” he said and simply, and directly left the room.
There was a somewhat awkward pause. Mr. Challoner was seriously angry with his ill-behaved son; Lady Sunningdale was disgusted at being deprived of her music, and Stella, with a natural eye for drama, was immensely interested. It seemed to her there might be a good deal of drama behind this little incident. Then, luckily perhaps, Lady Sunningdale remembered that she was, so to speak on a mission to the dark ignorance of Mr. Challoner, that savage in matters of art, on behalf of Martin, and she put her disgust in her pocket.
“It was charming of you to have come over to see me,” she said to him, with her easy-natured charm. “Yes, I suppose Martin wastes a terrible lot of time at the piano when he should be doing Greek history. Demosthenes! How fascinating! Stella dearest, do see what Suez Canal is doing, and slap him. And will you tell us when tea is ready? Do you know, Mr. Challoner, Martin plays remarkably,—really remarkably?”