She looked around at him, half tearful, half laughing, under her lashes.
“Oh, my dearest one, is it as bad as all that?”
“Worse, Joel, much worse.”
Of course it must be a dream, and a very bad one, that Whittaker had been saying things about cancer and murder and murderers. The more so when one looked at Whittaker himself, sitting genially, though perhaps with an extra dash of grey pallor, at the head of his board, lifting his champagne to touch glasses with Sydney Crawford: “To the lips, to the eyes.” The Stein song again! Would its revival never die? Yet it quite applied at Whittaker’s table tonight. Every woman in her way was as fair, as vital, as more than willing to play up, as any man could ask. Even Sydney, with a flash of challenging laughter at her husband, was returning Hartley Blake’s sallies in kind. Sydney was obviously fey tonight, with a heightened color, brighter eyes, and a recklessness of sentiment that might mean trouble. Had Neil and Romany failed in discretion?
Blake was in his usual excellent form; and it was plain to see thought his wit of too good a flavor to be entirely spent on a woman, even the excited Sydney. So he was tossing it by means of a slightly lifted voice up over his right shoulder at Dorn. Dorn however looked darkly unresponsive, and, being a man of few words, it seemed probable Blake would never know whether his delightful flippancies and exaggerations were being appreciated. Then, suddenly, he knew:
“As for myself,” Dorn remarked to his side-partners in particular, and to the table tangentially, “I have recently resolved to remain silent unless I feel that I can definitely contribute something worth while to the conversation. Time and energy are indiscriminately wasted in the futile, the repetitive, and the platitudinous. If we could hold our tongues until they were loosed by the real idea, the absolute necessity of speech, there would at least be a deal less noise, and quite possibly a return to the art of thinking which at present is a lost one.”
It was an insulting and uncalled for remark under the circumstances. Romany, who looked positively crestfallen for a change, perhaps needed a blunt rebuke (she wasn’t suppressed in a day), but Blake, though an inveterate talker, was a brilliant one. His high color showed such anger that the control of his first words was surprising.
“I should not only hold it, Dorn, I should bite it if I were you.”
The silence that fell in the room was deep and ominous. But in it was Whittaker’s opportunity, not only to distract Dorn and Blake, but to call attention to himself. Here, like Jason, he could cast his stone among the dragon’s teeth.
“I believe I have a contribution to make to the conversation, to the evening’s pastime, and I hope to posterity.”