"You look tired," she said, holding his face to the light. "Tell me what you've been doing all this while. You've become a great celebrity, Eric."
"There's nothing much to tell. I've been doing a lot of work, meeting a lot of people.… It's been rather fun.…"
As soon as she had put away the car, Sybil joined them and stood with her back to the fire and her hands in the pockets of a short tweed skirt, staring idly at her own small feet in their brown stockings and thick brogues and rousing herself with an abrupt jerk of the head when she wanted to intervene with a question.
"You were barely civil, when I rang you up the other night," she interjected, in a pause, with the disconcerting directness of nineteen.
"I was late already, and you were making me later," Eric answered patiently. "That night——? Oh, yes."
He detailed Lady Poynter's dinner to his mother and observed an expression of mixed curiosity and disapproval settling upon his sister's face.
"Mrs. O'Rane? Sonia Dainton that was? H'm," said Sybil. "And Lady Barbara Neave. Are you being taken up by that set now, Ricky?"
"I don't quite know what you mean by 'being taken up.' I met them at dinner.… And I lunched with the Crawleighs to-day," he added without filling in the intervening encounters. "Lady Crawleigh wants me to go down there next week-end, but I'm too busy; and week-ends simply wear me out."
"You have made yourself popular with them all at once!" Sybil commented. "What's Lady Barbara like?"
"Interesting girl," Eric answered, casually.