Gervase is amused, although he is disconcerted and irritated.
"Come, Dorothy, your guests are not always so very serious, are they? I never knew you so prim before."
Then she in turn feels angry. She always steadily adheres to the convenient fiction that she knows nothing whatever of the amorous filaments which bind her guests together in pairs, as turtle-doves might be tied together by blue ribbons.
"If you only desire to reawake the sentiments of Madame Sabaroff in your favor that you may again make sport of them, you must excuse me if I say that I cannot assist your efforts, and that I sincerely hope they will not be successful," she says, with dignity and distance.
"Do you suppose his are any better than mine?" asks Gervase, irritably, as he waves his hand towards the window which looks on the west gardens. Between the yew- and cedar-trees, at some distance from the house, Brandolin is walking beside Xenia Sabaroff: his manner is interested and deferential; she moves with slow and graceful steps down the grassy paths, listening with apparent willingness, her head is uncovered, she carries a large sunshade opened over it made of white lace and pale-rose silk, she has a cluster of Duchess of Sutherland roses in her hand. They are really only speaking of recent French poets, but those who look at them cannot divine that.
"He is not my cousin, and he does not solicit my assistance," says Dorothy Usk, seeing the figures in her garden with some displeasure. "Je ne fais pas la police pour les autres; but if he asked me what you asked me, I should give him the same answer that I give to you."
"He is probably independent of any assistance," says Gervase, with irritable irony.
"Probably," says his hostess, who is very skilful at fanning faint flame. "He is not a man whom I like myself, but many women—most women, I believe—think him irresistible."
Thereon she leaves him, without any more sympathy or solace, to go and receive some county people who have come to call, and who converse principally about prize poultry.
"Comme elles sont assommées avec leurs poules!" says the Marquise de Caillac, who chances to be present at this infliction, and gazes in stupefaction at a dowager duchess who has driven over from twenty miles off, who wears very thick boots, her own thin gray hair, water-proof tweed clothing, and a hat tied under her double chin with black strings. "Un paquet!" murmurs Madame de Caillac; "un véritable paquet!"