"Isn't it perfectly obvious that to begin with he and Roger must make up their wretched quarrel or whatever it is?" she rather impatiently put to me. "I've always thought it absurd and childish, this civil war kind of thing, but now I think it's horrible too—the rich brother not even allowing the poor one into his house! Like silly schoolboys playing a cruel game...." she added desperately.
I laughed at that, but insincerely.
"Surely you know your husband and his brother well enough to know that neither of them will ever do what they don't want to do! Really, my dear, it will be much better for every one, but mainly you, not to interfere between them....
"It's a silly idea, anyway," I added, "because even if Roger consented, which isn't probable, Antony would see him to blazes before he'd enter his house. I've tried 'em both, you know."
It was a little perturbing to have Iris pat my shoulder on that mockingly, and say: "There, there, everything will be all right—for who but Antony himself suggested it to me at lunch time?"
And she went on, my mind puzzled with this hard fact—Antony had told Iris that he wanted to make friends with Roger! Antony, the most obstinate braggart in the world!
"I chanced the subject, of course," Iris was saying, "and Antony agreed that it was the silliest thing in a silly life, and that he would like to put it right.... Surely they can't still be going on about that silly schoolboy quarrel you once told me about!"
"Oh, the quarrel! the quarrel was nothing, just a lid to the thing. The trivialest thing for a blaze of temper that I ever saw. But they must have hated each other for years."
She put her hands to her ears in mockery.
"Oh, dear! You're as bad and silly and sinister as they are! I'm terribly disappointed in you as a man of wise counsel, Ronnie. Grown up men don't go on hating each other for ever and ever, simply because they are made different—"