"Oh, yes," said Phyllis radiantly, "and you can trust me, and I won't fuss. All you have to do if I bore you is to look bored. You can, you know. You don't know how well you do it! And I'll stop. I'm going to ask Wallis how much of my society you'd better have, if any."
"Why, I don't think a good deal of it would hurt me," he said indifferently. But he smiled in a quite friendly fashion.
"All right," said Phyllis again brightly. But she fell silent then. There were two kinds of Allan, she reflected. This kind of Allan, who was very much more grown-up and wise than she was, and of whom she still stood a little in awe; and the little-boy Allan who had clung to her in nervous dread of the dark the other night—whom she had sent to sleep with children's stories. She wondered which was real, which he had been when he was well.
"I must go now and have something out with Mrs. Clancy," she said, smiling and rising. "She's perfectly certain carpets have to come up when you put down mattings, and I'm perfectly certain they don't."
She tucked the despised list, to which she had furtively added her bull-pup, into her sleeve, took her hand from his and went away. It seemed to Allan that the room was a little darker.
IX
Outside the sitting-room door stood Wallis, who had been lying in wait.
"I wanted to explain, madam, about the plans," he said. "It worries Mr. Allan. You see, madam, the late Mrs. Harrington was a great one for plans. She had, if I may say so, a new one every day, and she'd argue you deaf, dumb, and blind—not to speak ill of the dead—till you were fair beat out fighting it. Then you'd settle down to it—and next day there be another one, with Mrs. Harrington rooting for it just as hard, and you, with your mouth fixed for the other plan, so to speak, would have to give in to that. The plan she happened to have last always went through, because she fought for that as hard as she had for the others, and you were so bothered by then you didn't care what."
Wallis's carefully impersonal servant-English had slipped from him, and he was talking to Phyllis as man to man, but she was very glad of it. These were the sort of facts she had to elicit.