Under the tranquilling influence of tobacco, Loring recovered his good-humour and the controversy flickered to extinction. There was a short attempt to revive and explore the scandal of Croxton Hall, but Pentyre was secretly frightened by the possibility of seeing his name in the papers; and he knew from long experience that there was no surer way of achieving notoriety than that of telling anything in confidence to those of his friends whose social importance was measured by their range and freshness of gossip.
"You're too provoking!" Deganway protested shrilly, pinning him in an embrasure and flapping irritably with his eye-glass. "You know it's not fair to tell a story without giving all the names."
"I didn't tell the story," Pentyre pointed out.
"But I've asked Jim, and he won't say. Val! Do make him tell! He's being so tiresome."
Arden shrugged his shoulders and, with the outward frozen detachment which had become second nature to him, retired to a table by himself where he called for China tea and produced a pack of patience cards. There were other means of investigating the poker episode, and he had decided that it was more than time for the social satirist to make Barbara Neave's acquaintance. For the merits of the controversy he cared nothing, but his sense of humour was maliciously stirred in contemplation of a self-consciously decorous clan stung into undignified curvettings by a gadfly girl of sixteen. Though he ostentatiously refused to be drawn into partisanship, the stiff blamelessness of the interlocked Catholic families occasionally oppressed him; and the material outcome of Loring's tirade was to stimulate his desire to explore the domestic dissension at first hand.
"One feels that Lady Barbara would repay study," he observed to Jack, as they left the house together. "She is a new element in our worn-out social system."
"You must study her for me," answered Jack. "I agree with every word Jim said. I'm too busy to go out much, but some of the people I meet.... My father says that twenty years ago they wouldn't have been tolerated. But since the South African diamond boom and all the new money.... Of course, the girl just wants slapping."
"You have met her? No? One hoped that you would have effected the introduction."
"I avoid the present-day girl like the plague," said Jack.
The following afternoon Arden called in South Street with a book which, he assured Lady Knightrider, he had promised to lend her. Lady Barbara was at Hurlingham with Webster; but, as she was expected back to tea, he planted himself immovably in a chair and awaited her return. When at last she came, he found her utterly unlike the rebellious school-girl of his imagination. A childhood spent in public had matured her beyond her years so that she had the looks of twenty-two and the self-possession of forty. Instead of studying her, he found himself being studied; slender and lithe as a boy, she was tall enough to look down on him. He found her haggard with restlessness and a life of nervous excitement; her tired eyes, ever changing in size and colour, brightened as she took in his affectations of dress and mannerisms of speech; he felt that she was harmonizing her pose with his and that her vitality and quickness had already given her an advantage.