‘Couldn’t say what we think all the time or there’d’—and Sir William waved his cigar—‘there’d be the devil to pay! Not sure how it’ll work even here. Still, I’m with you, and I promise to tell the truth. Won’t hurt me for once. D’you all promise?’ They all promised.
‘How shall we begin, then?’ asked Margaret. It was queer, but she was quite eager to begin. She had played it before and had hated it—a thoroughly mischievous little game, she had thought. But now, perhaps because she was in such an odd jumble of a company, perhaps because she was simply taking shelter here, she was more than willing to ask and answer and listen.
‘We’ll do it this way,’ Penderel suggested. He pointed to Waverton. ‘I’ll ask you a question, then you’ll ask Mrs. Waverton, and so on round the table. That’s a pleasant neighbourly way of doing it. But everyone must speak up so that we can all hear.’
Nobody objected to the arrangement. ‘Ask away, then,’ said Philip. ‘But don’t be too hard on me. Remember I’m a shy man and I’m the first in the confessional.’
‘All right. Nothing too searching to begin with.’ Penderel reflected for a moment. ‘How’s this, then? There are, you’ll agree, innumerable snags in life——’
‘Oh, you mustn’t talk to him about life,’ Margaret broke in. ‘He’s just told me not to.’
‘You be quiet, Margaret,’ Philip growled, but felt himself warming towards her. That little characteristic thrust suddenly and cosily domesticated them. ‘Yes,’ he told Penderel, ‘I admit the snags.’
‘Good. Well, then’—and Penderel rumpled his hair and the girl at his side laughed at him—‘tell us what seems to you the snag-in-chief, the great, the fundamental snag. In a word, if there’s a catch in life, where does the catch come in? You follow me? Name the fly in the ointment?
Philip puffed at his pipe. ‘Wait a minute. That’s a question that can’t be answered without thought? He puffed away again.
‘You see what I mean?’ said Penderel. ‘Of course, you may not think there is any one great snag or catch. If so, you simply say so?