The light-hearted way in which she spoke quite robbed the words of any sting they might otherwise have conveyed, and Margaret was able to join in the laughter which this very mild way of describing the feeling she had shown the previous night evoked.
She was finding out that very little made the Danvers laugh, and when she came to think it over, she arrived at the right conclusion that she found this surprising, not because they laughed more than other young people, but because she had been used to the society of people who laughed so very much less. But anything seemed to serve with them as a cause for laughter. If the joke were a good one it evoked hearty laughter, if it were a bad one the perpetrator was laughed at; and if fresh jokes, good or bad, ran short, there was seemingly an endless store of old ones to be drawn upon, supplemented by catchwords and phrases from the latest musical comedy. These, of course, were even more unintelligible to Margaret than the rest of the queer, scrappy talk that made up the bulk of their conversation; but as she made no attempt to share in it, the fact that even their most everyday slang expressions were strange to her, passed unnoticed. For the most part, however, they were too much occupied with their own affairs to have much attention to spare for her; and it dawned upon Margaret, before even that first meal in their society was ended, that she need not have been afraid that they would bear malice against her for her outburst of the night before. They were really scarcely interested enough in her to do that. Under cover of the brisk chatter that went on round her, she took the opportunity of glancing round the table and studying the various members of the household.
With the exception of herself they numbered eight, and though there had been considerably more young people than that present in the billiard-room last night, she gathered from the conversation that was going on round her that, during the holidays at least, Mrs. Danvers kept a sort of open house for all the friends of her own children.
Opposite Margaret, on Geoffrey's other hand, sat Joan Green. Though she was only fifteen, she looked at least a year older, in spite of the fact that she wore her hair in a long, thick plait down her back. Margaret, who was still under the impression that Joan had been flying from the room in a rage as she came in, and that she had been the means of soothing her back to a better temper, was a little hurt and puzzled at the studious way in which Joan's eyes avoided hers. Once when she had caught their glance for a moment, and had smiled a friendly recognition into them, she had been rewarded by a cold glare that had quite startled her. Next to Joan sat Hilary, and the two girls had seemingly a great deal to say to each other, for though now and again they joined in the general conversation, for the most part they talked together in undertones audible to themselves alone. Hilary's face was a pale likeness of Maud's. Her eyes were not so blue, nor was her complexion so tanned as her sister's, and though her features resembled Maud's sufficiently closely to cause them to be easily recognised as sisters, Hilary's face lacked the look of sparkling vivacity which made Maud's face so attractive. On the other side of Hilary and next to Maud sat Jack, with his brother Noel, the other naval cadet, facing him. Then came Nancy, the girl who had offered Margaret chocolates and advice the previous evening, and when she caught Margaret's eyes now she smiled and nodded as much as to say she quite understood the latter's desire to find out what they were all like.
Nancy was not the only person who had noted the way in which Margaret's eyes had been travelling round the table, for when the turn of the boy next to her came to be inspected, she was startled to hear Geoffrey on the other side of her say:—
"Don't waste time on him, Miss Carson. He's not worth it, I assure you; that's only Edward—Silly Ned as we call him. You must call him that too; he never answers to any other name."
"Oh!" said Margaret, glancing with some apprehension at the small boy on her left as though she feared that he might think she was really going to call him anything of the sort.
Though he, too, was unmistakably a Danvers, he was more like Hilary than any of the others. He was a small, thin, delicate-looking boy, and he wore spectacles.
"Yes, we call him Silly Ned because he has all the brains of the family. He looks a mere child, doesn't he? But he's a sixth form boy at his college, and he got a Mathematical Exhibition last term. He's also a brilliant member of the cricket eleven. We try to take him down a peg or two in the holidays, but it isn't much good. His prizes and his cricket combined have made him too big for his boots. A nice little boy ruined, that's what he is."
"Oh, shut up, Geoffrey," Edward said; "sarcasm isn't really your line, you know."