Cecil started. “Have you been talking, Arnold? I’m so sorry—I missed it all. I expect it was good, wasn’t it?”
“No one is deceived,” Arnold said, severely. “Your ingenuous air, my young friend, is overdone.”
Cecil was looking at him earnestly. Eileen said, “He’s wondering was it you that reviewed ‘Squibs’ in Poetry and Drama, Arnold. He always looks like that when he’s thinking about reviews.”
“The same phrases,” Cecil murmured—“(meant to be witty, you know)—that Arnold used when commenting on ‘Squibs’ in private life to me. Either he used them again afterwards, feeling proud of them, to the reviewer (possibly Billy?) or the reviewer had just used them to him before he met me, and he cribbed them, or.... But I won’t ask. I mustn’t know. I prefer not to know. I will preserve our friendship intact.”
“What does the conceited child expect?” exclaimed Miss Hogan. “The review said he was more alive than Barker, and wittier than Wilde. The grossest flattery I ever read!”
“A bright piece,” Cecil remarked. “He said it was a bright piece. He did, I tell you. A bright piece.”
“Well, lots of the papers didn’t,” said Sally, consoling him. “The Daily Comment said it was long-winded, incoherent, and dull.”
“Thank you, Sally. That is certainly a cheering memory. To be found bright by the Daily Comment would indeed be the last stage of degradation.... I wonder what idiocy they will find to say of my next.... I wonder——”
“Have we all finished eating?” Arnold hastily intercepted. “Then let us pay, and go out for a country stroll, to get an appetite for lunch, which will very shortly be upon us.”
“My dear Arnold, one doesn’t stroll immediately after breakfast; how crude you are. One smokes a cigarette first.”