"About what? My dear Daphne! He could not possibly have meant to offend you! Could he, Mr. French?" Lady Barnes turned plaintively towards her very uncomfortable companions.
Daphne confronted her.
"If he chooses to think America immoral and degraded because American divorce laws are different from the English laws, let him think it!—but he has no business to air his views to an American—at a first visit, too!" said Daphne passionately, and, drawing herself up, she swept out of the room, leaving the others dumfoundered.
"Oh dear! oh dear!" wailed Lady Barnes. "And the Archdeacon is so important! Daphne might have been rude to anybody else—but not the Archdeacon!"
"How did they manage to get into such a subject—so quickly?" asked Elsie in bewilderment.
"I suppose he took it for granted that Daphne agreed with him! All decent people do."
Lady Barnes's wrath was evident—so was her indiscretion. Elsie French applied herself to soothing her, while Herbert French disappeared into the garden with a book. His wife, however, presently observed from the drawing-room that he was not reading. He was pacing the lawn, with his hands behind him, and his eyes on the grass. The slight, slowly-moving figure stood for meditation, and Elsie French knew enough to understand that the incidents of the afternoon might well supply any friend of Roger Barnes's with food for meditation. Herbert had not been in the drawing-room when Mrs. Fairmile was calling, but no doubt he had met her in the hall when she was on her way to her carriage.
Meanwhile Daphne, in her own room, was also employed in meditation. She had thrown herself, frowning, into a chair beside a window which overlooked the park. The landscape had a gentle charm—spreading grass, low hills, and scattered woods—under a warm September sun. But it had no particular accent, and Daphne thought it both tame and depressing; like an English society made up of Archdeacon Mountfords and their women-kind! What a futile, irritating man!—and what dull creatures were the wife and daughter!—mere echoes of their lord and master. She had behaved badly, of course; in a few days she supposed the report of her outburst would be all over the place. She did not care. Even for Roger's sake she was not going to cringe to these poor provincial standards.
And all the time she knew very well that it was not the Archdeacon and his fatuities that were really at fault. The afternoon had been decided not by the Mountfords' call, but by that which had preceded it.