"You might not find her agreeable," said Mr. Hayes drily. "She would be able to expose the fallacy of your views pretty clearly, I fancy."
"Well," Barbara struck in hurriedly, amazed at her own boldness, "we get hot enough over tennis sometimes, but nobody is ever so cross over that, as men are when they argue."
"Good heavens!" said Mr. Hayes. "To think that women, who rightfully should share man's most advanced attainments and aspirations—" and off he went at a canter over the beaten ground of many previous discussions.
Barbara looked from him to young Harding. His dark eyes were ominous, he was only waiting, breathlessly, till Mr. Hayes should be compelled to pause for breath. "I hope you don't mean to imply, sir—" he began, and Barbara perceived that not only had she failed to avert a collision, but that, by her thoughtless mention of the woman of the future, she had introduced the precise subject on which the two men were most furiously at variance. Thenceforward she merely glanced from one to the other as the noisy battle raged, watching in dumb suspense as one might watch the rising of a tide. Mr. Hayes had been thoroughly cross all day, and had not forgiven Reynold's rudeness of the evening before. Under cover of his argument he was saying all the irritating things he could think of, while Harding's harsher voice broke through his shrill-toned talk with rough contradictions.
After a time Barbara was obliged to leave them, and she went back to the drawing-room with a sinking heart. She had been uneasy the night before, but that was nothing to this. How earnestly she wished Mr. Pryor back again! She was pitiless, she would have flung the gentle flaccid little clergyman between the angry combatants without a moment's hesitation, if she could only have brought him there by the force of her desire. Happily for Mr. Pryor, however, he was safe in his study, putting away the Amalekites at the bottom of the drawer, till their turn should come again.
At last when Barbara was in despair at the lateness of the hour, she sent one of the maids to tell the gentlemen that coffee was ready, and crept into the hall behind her messenger to hear the result. At the opening of the door there was a stormy clamour, and then a sudden silence. It was closed again, and the maid returned. "Master says, Miss, will you send it in?" The last hope was gone, she could do nothing more but pour out the coffee, and wish with all her heart it were an opiate.
She was as firmly convinced as Reynold himself of the vast superiority of men, but these intellectual exercises of theirs upset her dreadfully. If only it had been Mr. Scarlett! He had a light laughing way of holding her uncle at arm's length, avowing himself a Conservative simply as a matter of taste, and fighting for the old fashions which Mr. Hayes denounced, because he wanted something left that he could make verses about. Barbara, as she stood pensively on the rug, recalled one occasion when Adrian Scarlett put forward his plea. He was sitting on the sill of the open window, with the evening sky behind his head, and while he talked he drew down a long, blossomed spray of pale French honeysuckle. "Oh yes, I'm a Conservative," he said; "there are lots of things I want to conserve—all the picturesqueness, old streets, and signs, and manor-houses, old customs, village greens, fairs, thatched cottages, little courtesying maidens, old servants, and men with scythes and flails, instead of your new machines." She remembered how Mr. Hayes had interrupted him with a contemptuous inquiry whether there was not as much poetry to be found on one side as on the other. "Oh yes," he had assented, idly swinging his foot, "as fine on your side no doubt, or finer. You have the Marseillaise style of thing to quicken one's pulses. Yes, and I came across a bit the other day, declaring—
'Que la Liberté sainte est la seule déesse,
Que l'on n'adore que debout.'"
The words, uttered in the sudden fulness of his clear, rounded tones, seemed to send a great wave of impulse through the quiet room. Barbara could recall the sharp "Well, then?" with which Mr. Hayes received it.