"You speak as if you bore gloomy tidings," she said.
Kindelon's eyes twinkled, though his mouth preserved perfect sobriety. "You have done precisely what I expected you would do," he said, "in undertaking an arbitrary selection of certain guests and an arbitrary exclusion of certain others. You have raised a growl."
"A growl!" murmured Mrs. Dares, with a slight dismayed gesture.
Pauline's face grew serious. "Who, pray, are the growlers?" she asked.
"Well, the chief one is that incorrigible and irrepressible Barrowe. He has his revolutionary opinions, of course. He is always having revolutionary opinions. He makes me think of the Frenchman who declared that if he ever found himself in Heaven his first impulse would be to throw up barricades."
Pauline bit her lip. "Barricades are usually thrown up in streets," she said, with a faint, ired ring of the voice. "Mr. Barrowe probably forgets that fact."
"Do you mean that you would like to show him the street now?" asked Kindelon.
"I have not heard of what his alleged growl consists."
"I warned you against him, but you thought it best that he should be invited. Since you had decided upon weeding, there was no one whom you could more profitably weed."
"Mr. Barrowe has a very kind heart," here asserted Mrs. Dares, with tone and mien at their gentlest and sweetest. "He is clad with bristles, if you please, but the longer you know him the more clearly you recognize that his savage irritability is external and superficial."