“Ye—es.”
Joan turned sharply and looked at her companion. Dorothy Roden's face was not, perhaps, easy to read, especially when she turned, as she turned now, to meet an inquiring glance with an easy smile.
“I have known so many of Percy's schemes,” she explained, “that you must not expect me to be enthusiastic about this.”
“But this must succeed, whatever may have happened to the others,” cried Joan. “It is such a good cause. Surely nothing can be a better aim than to help such afflicted people, who cannot help themselves, Dorothy! And it is so splendidly organized. Why, Mr. Johnson, the labour expert, you know, who wears no collar and a soft hat, said that it could not have been better organized if it had been a strike. And a Bishop Somebody—a dear old man with legs like a billiard-table—said it reminded him of the early Christians' esprit de corps, or something like that. Doesn't sound like a bishop, though, does it?”
“No, it doesn't,” admitted Dorothy, doubtfully.
“So if your brother thinks it will not succeed,” said Joan, confidently, “he is wrong. Besides”—in a final voice—“he has Tony to help him, you know.”
“Yes,” said Dorothy, looking straight in front of her, “of course he has Mr. Cornish.”
“And Tony,” pursued Joan, eagerly, “always succeeds. There is something about him—I don't know what it is.”
Dorothy recollected that Mrs. Vansittart had said something like this about Tony Cornish. She had said that he had the power of holding his cards and only playing them at the right moment. Which is perhaps the secret of success in life, namely, to hold one's cards, and, if the right moment does not present itself, never to play them at all, but to hold them to the end of the game, contenting one's self with the knowledge that one has had, after all, the makings of a fine game that might have been worth the playing.
“There are people, you know,” Joan broke in earnestly, “who think that if they can secure Tony for a picnic the weather will be fine.”