“Look here! You said you found Holabird ‘charming.’ It makes me tired to have you fall for his scientific tripe and not appreciate Stokes. Stokes is hard—thank God!—and probably he’s rude. Why not? He’s fighting a world that bellows for fake charm. No scientist can go through his grind and not come out more or less rude. And I tell you Stokes was born a researcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude? Wish you could hear him being rude to me!”
Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately shocked, and the five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while Martin raged on, trying to convey his vision of the barbarian, the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science. But Joyce Lanyon’s lovely eyes were kind, and when she spoke she had lost something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a diner-out:
“Yes. I suppose it’s the difference between me, playing at being a planter, and Cecil.”
After dinner he walked with her in the garden and sought to defend himself against he was not quite sure what, till she hinted:
“My dear man, you’re so apologetic about never being apologetic! If you really must be my twin brother, do me the honor of telling me to go to the devil whenever you want to. I don’t mind. Now about your Gottlieb, who seems to be so much of an obsession with you—”
“Obsession! Rats! He—”
They parted an hour after.
Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping, puerile, irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pickerbaugh, but as he went to bed in a room with old prints and a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere near him was Joyce Lanyon.
He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love with this desirable and quite useless young woman? (How lovely her shoulders, above black satin at dinner! She had a genius of radiant flesh; it made that of most women, even the fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There was a rosy glow behind it, as from an inner light.)
Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the house? (Dear Leora, who was the source of life! Was she now, off there in Penrith Lodge, missing him, lying awake for him?)