Exactly at what point, one wondered that evening, did behaviour become hypocrisy? For instance, Guy. There he sat, that knight of old beliefs, at our head, very gay in white flannels and a brilliant Fair Isle sweater, for all the world as though it was not already stifling enough, for all the world as though two people at his table hadn’t offended him on the one essential point of conduct by which Guy de Travest knew friends from strangers: never to give way to what you want to do, if honour tells you that you may not do it.
And Napier, that love-lost man! Love-lost, that man? Let me tell of a moment after dinner when Venice suddenly, tremendously, helplessly, cried to Iris: “Oh, dear Jesu, aren’t you lovely!” And Napier, at that moment gaiety itself, came suddenly between them, an arm round each of their shoulders. “Why, of course she is, Venice! I tell you, I was particular about my friends when I was young....” It wasn’t, of course, voluntary, he was not thinking, Napier couldn’t think and then be a hypocrite: it was just the natural, normal sort of nonsense that happens. He had, at that moment, forgotten what he would have to tell Venice, to-morrow or the day after, of the love-philtre. And the child Venice! Venice, that very queen of hypocrites! Charming she was to Iris, just the tiniest bit deferential, as a girl of one-and-twenty might well be, but seldom is, to a woman of thirty. And yet Venice, ever since that afternoon in Paris, had been, I knew, eating her heart fretting about Napier, fearful and jealous and racked by what she could not see of his heart, tremulous with terror and suspicion of that legendary playmate, that Iris March of long ago. And how she hated the idea of Iris, I knew well, how she hated the thing she thought Iris was—and wasn’t Iris just that!—with all the uncompromising savagery of her heart! Venice, O Venice! And once, over dinner, she whispered to me: “I like Mrs. Storm.”
I don’t know, of course, but I suppose that in saying nothing one said quite enough to that.
“I do really,” Venice insisted, but not with enough vehemence for one to be able to fix on that as evidence of her insincerity. “She gives you a sense of ... well, completeness, if you see what I mean?”
“Oh, quite,” I said. “Completeness, certainly....”
“Not like Shirley and me, you see,” she said thoughtfully.
“Yes, I can just see that, Venice.”
“Mrs. Storm,” said Venice gravely, “gives one a sense of being a lady from herself, in her own right, if you see what I mean. Whereas Shirley and me——”
“Shirley and I.”
“Shirley and I, dear, and nearly every one we know are ladies just because our mothers were, and that kind of thing. I’d trust Mrs. Storm....”