“Besides,” said I, “the word ‘take’ is not one that I should apply to Mrs. Harter, least of all, perhaps, where her husband is concerned.”
“In any case, she’s bound to sing for us,” Christopher pointed out.
He was taking the play with intense seriousness, whereas the triangle of Bill, and Mrs. Harter, and Mrs. Harter’s husband scarcely interested him at all.
He saw it—when he did see it, that is to say—merely as something rather commonplace and faintly shocking.
“Well, I suppose I must give them the opportunity of behaving properly,” said Claire, referring to Mrs. Harter, and she wrote a note and sent it to Queen Street by hand, expressing a perfunctory hope that Mrs. Harter would “bring” her husband to the theatricals and the dance. None of us were exactly surprised, but all of us were perhaps more or less conscious of obscure excitement, when Mrs. Harter, in a laconic note, accepted Claire’s invitation on behalf of herself and Mr. Harter.
Chapter Thirteen
Martyn Ambrey, evidently desirous of showing me what a strongly individual viewpoint he possessed, told me that evening that he felt “Mr. Harter,” as we all called him, in faint mimicry of his wife’s invariable phrase, to be very much more worth seeing than the theatricals themselves.
I did not tell him that I felt exactly the same. He would probably not have believed me.
By seven o’clock the house was full of people, most of them in a state of great disorder and agitation.
People were dressing, or even undressing, in almost every room.