"No, no! I must go back to Captain Roughsedge first and get some new arguments!"
"Roughsedge!" he said, in surprise. "Roughsedge? He never carried an argument through in his life!"
Diana defended her new friend to ears unsympathetic. Her defence, indeed, evoked from him a series of the same impatient, sarcastic remarks on the subject of the neighbors as had scandalized her the day before. She fired up, and they were soon in the midst of another battle-royal, partly on the merits of particular persons and partly on a more general theme--the advantage or disadvantage of an optimist view of your fellow-creatures.
Marsham was, before long, hard put to it in argument, and very delicately and discreetly convicted of arrogance or worse. They were entering the woods of the park when he suddenly stopped and said:
"Do you know that you have had a jolly good revenge--pressed down and running over?"
Diana smiled, and said nothing. She had delighted in the encounter; so, in spite of castigation, had he. There surged up in him a happy excited consciousness of quickened life and hurrying hours. He looked with distaste at the nearness of the house; and at the group of figures which had paused in front of them, waiting for them, on the farther edge of the broad lawn.
"You have convicted me of an odious, exclusive, bullying temper--or you think you have--and all you will allow me in the way of victory is that I got the best of it because Captain Roughsedge wasn't there!"
"Not at all. I respect your critical faculty!"
"You wish to hear me gush like Mrs. Minchin. It is simply astounding the number of people you like!"
Diana's laugh broke into a sigh.