"What you can possibly find to laugh at I fail to see!" said Paula, a dangerous light in her eyes. "Laughter was not the reaction I expected!"
"It wasn't your fault," Mathilda assured her penitently. "In fact, the more tragic recitations are the more I feel impelled to laugh."
"I know so well what you mean!" said Joseph. "Ah, Paula, my dear, Tilda is paying you a greater tribute than you know! You conveyed such a feeling of tension in those few gestures that our Tilda's nerves frayed under it. I remember once, when I was playing in Montreal, to a packed house, working up to a moment of unbearable tension. I felt my audience with me, hanging, as it were, on my lips. I paused for my climax; I knew myself to be holding the house in the hollow of my hand. Suddenly a man broke into laughter! Disconcerting? Yes, but I knew why he laughed, why he could not help laughing!"
"I wouldn't mind hazarding a guess myself," agreed Stephen.
This pleased Nathaniel so much that he changed his mind about banning the reading of Wormwood, and bade Roydon, for the third time, to get on with it.
Roydon said: "Enter Mrs. Perkins, the landlady," and doggedly read a paragraph describing this character in terms revolting enough to have arrested the attention of his hearers had not this been diverted by Maud, who was moving stealthily about the room in search of something.
"The suspense is killing me!" Stephen announced at last. "What are you looking for, Aunt?"
"It's all right, my dear: I'm not going to disturb anyone," replied Maud untruthfully. "I just wondered where I had laid my knitting down. Please go on reading, Mr. Roydon! So interesting! It quite takes one back."
Stephen, who had joined Mathilda in the search for the knitting, remarked, sotto voce, that he had always wondered where Joe had picked Maud up, and now he knew. Mathilda, unearthing an embryo sock on four steel needles from behind a cushion, told him he was a cad.
"Thank you, my dear," said Maud, settling herself by the fire again. "Now I can be getting on with it while I listen."