“No more—to-day,” she told him, “enough is better than too much feast.”
“And what a feast!” he said sincerely.
“Do you like Stephen Pryde?” she demanded abruptly, closing the piano.
“I’ve known him since he was a child.”
She accepted the evasion, or rather, to be more exact, spared him putting its admission into cruder wording.
“Well—you’re wrong. You’re all wrong. I like him. No one else does, except Hugh, and Hugh doesn’t count. But I do: and I like Stephen Pryde immensely.”
“You certainly do count, very much,” Latham told her emphatically. And she did not contradict him by so much as a gesture of her ring-covered hands or a lift of the straight black eyebrows. “Why doesn’t Hugh count?” he asked.
“Because he likes every one. The people who like every one never do count. It is silly. It’s too silly. Now, Stephen Pryde does no such thing.”
“No,” agreed Latham, “he does not; and certainly ‘silly’ is the last word I should employ to describe him.”
“Silly!” Angela said with high scorn. “There isn’t a silly hair on his head. He’s a genius—and he’s hungry—oh! so hungry.”