Pleased with his jest, he turned to acquaint Connie with Jimmie's new dignity. Both the jest and the laugh that greeted it jarred upon Norma. Jimmie said to her good-humouredly:
“I might be Chicot, the loyal friend, without the cap and bells. I am a dull dog.”
She looked out of the window and laughed somewhat bitterly.
“I think you are a great deal too good to have anything to do with any of us.”
“It pleases you to talk arrant nonsense,” said he.
Luncheon was announced. At table Jimmie and Norma were neighbours. Aline sat between Morland, who was next to Norma, and old Colonel Pawley. As the latter at first talked to Mrs. Deering, Aline and Morland carried on a frigid conversation. They had never been friends. To Morland, naturally, she was merely a little girl of no account, who had often been annoyingly in the way when he wanted to converse with Jimmie; and Aline, with a little girl's keen intuition, had divined more of his real character than she was aware of, and disliked and distrusted him. Like a well-brought-up young lady she answered “yes” and “no” politely to his remarks, but started no fresh topic. At last, to her relief, Colonel Pawley rescued her from embarrassed silence. To him she had extended her favour. He was a short fat man, with soft hands and a curious soft purring voice, and the air rather of a comfortable old lady than of a warrior who had retired on well-merited laurels. He occupied his plentiful leisure by painting on silk, which he made into fans for innumerable lady acquaintances. In his coat-tail pocket invariably reposed a dainty volume bound in crushed morocco—a copy of little poems of his own composition—and this, when he was in company with a sympathetic feminine soul, he would abstract with apoplectic wheezing and bashfully present. He also played little tunes on the harp. Aline, with the irreverence of youth, treated him as a kind of human toy.
His first word roused the girl's spontaneous gaiety. She bubbled over with banter. The mild old warrior chuckled with her, threw himself unreservedly into the childish play. Connie whispered to Jimmie:
“I should like to tie a bit of blue ribbon round his neck and turn him loose in a meadow. I am sure he would frisk.”
Morland exchanged casual remarks with Norma. She answered absently. The change in Aline from the unsmiling primness wherewith Morland's society had cloaked her to sunny merriment with Colonel Pawley was too marked to escape her attention. In spite of the ludicrousness of the comparison, she could not help perceiving that the old man who radiated boredom had a quality of charm unpossessed by Morland, and she felt absurdly disappointed with her lover. During the last few days she had made up her mind to like him. Sober forecast of a lifetime spent in the inevitable intimacy of marriage had forced her to several conclusions. One, that it was essential to daily comfort that a woman should find the personality of a husband pleasing rather than antipathetic. With more ingenuousness than the world would have put to her credit, she had set herself deliberately to attain this essential ideal. The natural consequence was a sharply critical attitude and a quickly developing sensitiveness, whereby, as in a balance of great nicety, the minor evidences of his character were continually being estimated. Thus, Morland's jest before luncheon had jarred upon her. His careless air of patronage had betrayed a lack of appreciation of something—the word “spiritual” was not in her vocabulary, or she might have used it—of something, at all events, in his friend which differentiated him from the casual artist and which she herself had, not without discomfort, divined at their first meeting. The remark had appeared to her in bad taste. Still ruffled, she became all the more critical, and noted with displeasure his failure to have won a child's esteem. And yet she felt a touch of resentment against Jimmie for being the innocent cause of her discomposure. It gave rise to a little feline impulse to scratch him and see whether he were not mortal like every one else.
“Do you ever exhibit at the Royal Academy?” she asked suddenly.