She forced herself to meet Allison's eyes with a smile, to answer his questions, and to put in a word, now and then, when Madame or the Colonel paused. Yet, with every sense at its keenest, she noted Isabel's downcast eyes, the self-conscious air with which Allison spoke to her, and the exaggerated consideration of Juliet which he instinctively adopted as a shield. She saw, too, that Isabel was secretly annoyed whenever Allison spoke to Juliet, and easily translated the encouraging air with which Isabel met Romeo's admiring glances. Once, when he happened to turn quickly enough to see, a shadow crossed Allison's face, and he bit his lips.
"How civilised the world has become," Madame was saying, lightly. "The mere breaking of bread together precludes all open hostility. Bitter enemies may meet calmly at the dinner table of a mutual friend, and I understand that, in the higher circles in which we do not care to move, a man may escort his divorced wife out to dinner, and, without bitterness, congratulate her upon her approaching marriage."
"I've often thought," returned the Colonel, more seriously, "that the modern marriage service should be changed to read 'until death or divorce do us part.' It's highly inconsistent as it stands."
"'Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,'" she quoted. "Inconsistency goes as far toward making life attractive as its pleasures do toward spoiling it."
"What do you call pleasure?" queried Allison.
"The unsought joy. If you go out to hunt for it, you don't often get it. When you do, you've earned it and are entitled to it. True pleasure is a free gift of the gods, like a sense of humour."
By some oblique and unsuspected way, the words brought a certain comfort to Rose. Without bitterness, she remembered that Allison had once said: "In any true mating, they both know." Over and over again she said to herself, stubbornly: "I will have nothing that is not true—nothing that is not true."
It was a wise hostess who discovered the fact that changing rooms may change moods; that many a successful dinner has an aftermath in the drawing-room as cold and dismal as a party call. Madame Francesca had once characterised the hour after dinner as "the stick of a sky-rocket, which never fails to return and bring disillusion with it." Hence she postponed it as long as she could, but the Colonel himself gave the signal by moving back his chair.
An awkward pause followed, which lasted until Rose went to the piano of her own accord and began to play. At length she drifted into the running chords of a familiar accompaniment and Allison took his violin and joined in. As he stood by Rose, the mere fact of his nearness brought her a strange peace. Had she looked up, she would have seen that though he stood so near her, he had eyes only for Isabel and was playing to her alone.
Isabel did not seem to care. She sat with her hands folded idly in her lap, occasionally glancing at the twins who sat together on a sofa across the room. Madame Bernard and the Colonel had gone out on the balcony that opened off of the library.