When her brother entered the room she was fitfully engaged in perpetrating a crewel-work atrocity for one of her many chairs.
He did not speak his thought at once, but stood looking down at her critically through the smoke-wreaths of his cigar. The major share of good looks certainly rested with himself; but for eyes set too near together, and the relentless lines that envy and ill-humour pencil about a man's mouth, the face was attractive enough, in its limited fashion. He had the same air of being "off duty" which pervaded his sister, and his Japanese smoking-suit showed signs of being a very old friend indeed.
"Look here, Linda," he began at last, "when are we playing tennis again with little Mrs Desmond?"
"I think it was Tuesday," she said.
"Well, then, ask her to tea here first, d'you see?"
Linda's brown eyes—it pleased her to call them hazel—widened with surprise.
"Oh, my! D'you think she would reallee come? It was nastee of her to leave us out of her picnic like that, after she told me all about it, too."
Miss Kresney's insistence on the consonants and the final vowels was more marked than her brother's; for although three-fourths of the blood in her veins was English, very few of her intimate associates could make so proud a boast without perjuring their souls: and there are few things more infectious than tricks of speech.
"Yes, of course," he acquiesced readily. "But I'm jolly well certain that was not her doing. She'll come, right enough, if you ask her nicely. At all events it is worth trying, if only on the chance of annoying her insufferable husband."