“She is a Socialist like you, isn’t she, Guy?” persisted Rory.
“He means an intellectual character,” explained Guy, not ill-pleased.
“No, but you do want to blow us all up, don’t you?”
“Do I?” said Teresa coldly.
“Well, I believe I’m a Bolshevik myself, a revolution would be my only chance of getting into the Guards. ‘Hell-for-leather Dundas of the Red Guards!’ It sounds like a hero by ... that mad woman our mothers knew in Florence, Guy—what was her name?... Yes, like a hero in a Ouida novel.”
“Do I hear you say, Dundas, that you think yourself like one of ... er ... Ouida’s heroes?” said Harry Sinclair, coming in at that moment with Dick.
“Well, sir, modesty forbids me to say so in so many words,” grinned Rory.
“There used to be an aged don at Cambridge,” continued Harry, “half-blind, wholly deaf, and with an ... er ... game ... leg, and when he was asked to what character in history he felt most akin he answered ... er ... er ‘ALCIBIADES’!”
“That was old Potter, wasn’t it? I remember ...” began Dick, but Concha interrupted him by exclaiming eagerly: “What a good game! Let’s play it—history or fiction, but we mustn’t say our own, we must guess each other’s’—Rory is settled, he thinks himself like a Ouida hero ...” and she suddenly broke off, turned red, and looked at Teresa with that glazed opaque look in her eyes, that with her was a sign of mingled embarrassment and defiance.
Teresa’s heart began to beat a little faster; who would Concha say she, Teresa, thought herself like? And who would she say Concha thought herself like? It would perhaps be a relief to them both to say, for once, things that were definitely spiteful—a relief from this continual X-raying of each other’s thoughts, and never a word said.