"There you are; the dog in the manger! You won't let him discuss your affairs, and you are annoyed when he talks about his own."
"I admit I can't bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, not their confounded place!) This calling it after him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond's standing for it! It's brazen impudence."
Mrs. St. Peter frowned pensively. "I knew you wouldn't like it, but they were so pleased about it, and their motives are so generous——"
"Hang it, Outland doesn't need their generosity! They've got everything he ought to have had, and the least they can do is to be quiet about it, and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn't. You yourself used not to like it. And will you give me some more coffee, please?"
She refilled his cup and handed it across the table. "Nice hands," he murmured, looking critically at them as he took it, "always such nice hands."
"Thank you. I dislike floridity when it is beaten up to cover the lack of something, to take the place of something. I never disliked it when it came from exuberance. Then it isn't floridness, it's merely strong colour."
"Very well; some people don't care for strong colour. It fatigues them." He folded his napkin. "Now I must be off to my desk."
"Not quite yet. You never have time to talk to me. Just when did it begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners—that convention that if a man were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn't say so, frankly?" Mrs. St. Peter spoke thoughtfully, as if she had considered this matter before.
"Oh, it goes back a long way. I rather think it began in the Age of Chivalry—King Arthur's knights. Whoever it was lived in that time, some feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of them, and that he shouldn't speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a Phyllis or a Nicolette. It's a nice idea, reserve about one's deepest feelings: keeps them fresh."
"The Oriental peoples didn't have an Age of Chivalry. They didn't need one," Lillian observed. "And this reserve—it becomes in itself ostentatious, a vain-glorious vanity."