"Oh, you can scoff!" she flung at him. "But even you must feel the tension!"
"Well, do you know, it's an awfully funny thing, because I'm not a bit psychic, or anything like that, but I do see what Paula means," said Valerie. "It's a kind of an atmosphere." She turned to Roydon. "You could write a marvellous play about it, couldn't you?"
"I don't know that it would be quite in my line," he replied.
"Oh, I have an absolute conviction that you're the sort of person who could write a marvellous play about simply anything!" said Valerie, raising admiring eyes to his face.
"Even guinea-pigs?" asked Stephen, introducing a discordant note.
The playwright flushed. "Very funny!"
Mathilda perceived that Mr. Roydon was unused to being laughed at. "Let me advise you to pay little if any heed to my cousin Stephen!" she said.
Stephen never minded what Mathilda said to him; he only grinned; but Joseph, at no time remarkable for tact, brought the saturnine look back to his face by saying: "Oh, we all know what an old bear Stephen likes to pretend to be!"
"God!" said Stephen, very distinctly.
Paula sprang up, thrusting the hair back from her brow with one of her hasty gestures. "That's what I mean! You're all of you behaving like this because the house has got you! It's the tension: something stretching and stretching until it snaps! Stephen's always worse when he's here; I'm on edge; Valerie flirts with Willoughby to make Stephen jealous; Uncle Joe's nervous, saying the wrong thing: not wanting to, but impelled to!"