To say that anything was a quotation was an excellent method, in Eleanor's eyes, for withdrawing it from discussion, just as you could always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying "It's mutton."
And, of course, Arlington Stringham continued to tread the thorny path of conscious humour into which Fate had beckoned him.
"The country's looking very green, but, after all, that's what it's there for," he remarked to his wife two days later.
"That's very modern, and I dare say very clever, but I'm afraid it's wasted on me," she observed coldly. If she had known how much effort it had cost him to make the remark she might have greeted it in a kinder spirit. It is the tragedy of human endeavour that it works so often unseen and unguessed.
Arlington said nothing, not from injured pride, but because he was thinking hard for something to say. Eleanor mistook his silence for an assumption of tolerant superiority, and her anger prompted her to a further gibe.
"You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I've no doubt she would appreciate it."
Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
"The rift is widening to an abyss," said Eleanor to her mother that afternoon.
"I should not tell that to anyone," remarked her mother, after long reflection.
"Naturally, I should not talk about it very much," said Eleanor, "but why shouldn't I mention it to anyone?"