Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music—Penelope's music—and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.
It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent—the opportunity she had craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling. None the less, he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.
"What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of; have you?"
"Yes," she confessed, looking away from him.
"What is it?"
"I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is good reason to believe he didn't want to come."
"What makes you think he didn't want to come?"
"Why—I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings in time past—the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and instant and sympathetic apprehension.
"You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn't glad enough to give," he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.
"Is that saying very much—or very little?"