Stonor waved away Mrs. Freddy's shower of excuses, saying—
'You've come just in time to save us from falling out. I've been telling Miss Dunbarton that in another age she would have been a sort of Dinah Morris, or more likely another St. Ursula with a train of seven thousand virgins.'
'And all because I've told him about my Girls' Club! and——'
'Yes,' he said, '"and"——' He turned away and shook hands with his two kinsmen. He sat talking to them with his back to the girl.
It was a study in those delicate weights and measures that go to estimating the least tangible things in personality, to note how his action seemed not only to dim her vividness but actually to efface the girl. In the first moments she herself accepted it at that. Her looks said: He is not aware of me any more—ergo, I don't exist.
During the slight distraction incident to the bringing in of tea, and Mr. Freddy's pushing up some of the big chairs, Mr. Stonor had a moment's remembrance of her. He spoke of his Scottish plans and fell to considering dates. Then all of a sudden she saw that again and yet more woundingly his attention had wandered. The moment came while Lord Borrodaile was busy Russianizing a cup of tea, and Mr. Freddy, balancing himself on very wide-apart legs in front of his wife's tea-table, had interrogated her—
'What do you think, shall I ring and say we aren't at home?'
'Perhaps it would be——' Mrs. Freddy's eye flying back from Stonor caught her brother-in-law's. 'Freddy'—she arrested her husband as he was making for the bell—'say, "except to Miss Levering."'
'All right. Except to Miss Levering.' And it was at that point that Jean saw she wasn't being listened to.
Even Mrs. Freddy, looking up, was conscious of something in Stonor's face that made her say—