"I'm fearfully sorry, Pansy love. I never thought to expatiate beforehand on Tony and you.... I introduced you as Miss Ponsonby—but I suppose he never noticed, or thought you were the Cheeper's governess or something. Who'd have thought he'd take on like that? But you never know, with the clergy; they're so unaccountable."
"I'm relieved, a bit," Pansy said. "I was frightened of him, that's a fact."
Dr. Cross said, "The queer thing about Stephen Dixon is that you never know when he'll take a thing in this way and when he won't. I've known him sit at tea in the houses of the lowest slum criminals—by the way, that is surely the scriptural line—and I've known him cut in the street people who were doing the same things in a different way—a sweating shopowner, for instance. I sometimes think it depends with him on the size and comfort of the house the criminal lives in, which is too hopelessly illogical, you'd think, for an intelligent man like him. I lose my patience with him sometimes, I confess. But anyhow he knows his own mind."
"He's gone," Pansy said to Anthony, who was waiting for them at the gate. "He thinks it's important not to acquiesce in us. So he's gone to the inn.... By the way, I nearly told him that the innkeeper is leading a double life too—ever so much worse than ours—but I thought it would be too unkind, he'd have had to sleep on the green."
"Well," Anthony said crossly, "we can get on without him. But another time, darling, I wish you'd remember that there's not the least need to explain our domestic affairs in the lane to casual acquaintances, even if they do happen to be spending the night. It's simply not done, you know! It makes a most embarrassing situation all round. I know you're not shy, but you might remember that I am."
"Sorry, old dear," said Pansy. "There's been so much explainin' this evenin' that I suppose I caught it.... You people," she added to Dr. Cross and Kitty, "have got awkwarder things to explain than I have. I'd a long sight rather have to explain free love than love by Act of Parliament."
"But on the whole," said the doctor, relieved to have got on to that subject again after the rather embarrassing interlude of private affairs, "I thought the meeting this evening not bad. What did you think, Miss Grammont?"
"I should certainly," said Kitty, "have expected it to have been worse. If I had been one of the audience, it would have been."
6
Some of the subsequent meetings of that campaign, in fact, were. But not all. On the whole, as Dr. Cross put it, they were not bad.