"Yes."
"I'll find out when she's not at home and let you know. You can call then."
A fourth card he tore up and threw into the fire.
"Some people have confounded impudence."
Anne went away confirmed in her impression that Walter had a large acquaintance to whom he was by no means anxious to introduce his wife. He might, she reflected, have incurred the connection through the misfortune of his business. The life of a ship-owner in Scale was fruitful in these embarrassments.
But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them for an instant. He must give them up.
She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined, after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.
Anne wondered how he would comport himself at the dinner on the fifteenth. She owned to a little uneasiness at the prospect. Would he indeed yield to the sobering influence of Thurston Square? Or would he try to impose his alien, his startling personality on it? She had begun to realise how alien he was, how startling he could be. Would he sit silent, uninspiring and uninspired? Or would unholy and untimely inspirations seize him? Would he scatter to the winds all conversational conventions, and riot in his own unintelligible frivolity? What would he say to Mrs. Eliott, that priestess of the pure intellect? Was there anything in him that could be touched by her uncoloured, immaterial charm? Would he see that Mr. Eliott's density was only a mask? Would the Gardners bore him? And would he like Miss Proctor? And if he didn't, would he show it, and how? His mere manners would, she knew, be irreproachable, but she had no security for his spiritual behaviour. He impressed her as a creature uncaught, undriven; graceful, but immeasurably capricious.
The event surprised her.
For the first five minutes or so, it seemed that Mrs. Eliott and her dinner were doomed to failure; so terrible a cloud had fallen on her, and on her husband, and on every guest. Never had the poor priestess appeared so abstract an essence, so dream-driven and so forlorn. Never had Mr. Eliott worn his mask to so extinguishing a purpose. Never had Miss Proctor been so obtrusively superior, Mrs. Gardner so silent, Dr. Gardner so vague. They were all, she could see, possessed, crushed down by their consciousness of Majendie and his monstrous past.