CHAPTER XIII.
A DINNER-PARTY.
“Go, let him have a table by himself!
For he does neither affect company,
Nor is he fit for’t, indeed.”
In spite of the incontestable success of my decorations, which drew forth the admiration of even the superior Henrietta O’Neill, I felt, before we had arrived at the period of fish, that the dinner-party was likely to be a failure.
Uncle Dominick had, of course, taken in the elder Miss O’Neill, and as far as they were concerned nothing was left to be desired. Conversation of a fluent and high-class order was evidently her strong point. She at once entered upon a discussion of Irish politics with my uncle in a manner deserving of all praise, and as I surreptitiously studied her pale, plain, intellectual face, with the dark hair severely drawn back, and heard her enunciate her opinions in clearly framed sentences, I became deeply conscious of my own general inferiority.
Nevertheless, I did what in me lay to talk to Nugent O’Neill, who had taken me in, thus leaving to Willy the necessary and, as I thought, congenial task of entertaining Miss Connie. Nothing could apparently be better arranged. Nugent had exchanged his frigid, uninterested civility of the day before for an excellent semblance of sociability, beneath which, as it seemed to me, he concealed a curious observation of all that I said. He had a dark clever face, with strong well-cut features, and blue eyes, with a pleasanter expression in them than I had at first expected to see there. His voice would have been monotonous in its quietness and unexcitability had it not been for a certain humorous, semi-American turn which he occasionally imparted to his sentences. He annoyed me, but at the same time he was interesting; moreover—which was to me a very strong point in his favour—he was evidently as much alive as I to the fact that for the next hour and a half it would be our solemn duty to amuse each other, and to that intent we both performed prodigies of agreeability.
But Willy was the cause of disaster. I became gradually aware that silence was settling down upon him and Connie, and that, instead of devoting himself to her, he, with his eyes fixed on me and my partner, was listening moodily to what we were saying. When this had gone on for some minutes, during which Connie crumbled her bread and looked cross, I was exasperated to the point of bestowing a glance upon him calculated to awaken in him a sense of his bad manners. Far, however, from accepting my reproof, Willy returned my look with a gaze of admiring defiance, and projected himself into our conversation by flatly contradicting what Nugent was saying. The latter rose many degrees in my estimation by ignoring the interruption till he had reached the end of his sentence. Then, with a tolerating smile, he looked past me to Willy, and asked him what he had said.
Willy’s dark eyebrows met in a way that unpleasantly reminded me of his father.
“If it wasn’t worth listening to, it’s not worth repeating,” he said aggressively.
Terrified by the turn things were taking, I struck in quickly, “Oh, Willy! have you told Miss O’Neill what you heard to-day about the Jackson-Crolys giving a ball?”
“No; I thought she’d have heard it herself,” he returned ungraciously.