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The Laurel and the Rose.

Of course they did meet again. It was only four days after the Listers’ dance that he had to take her in to dinner, much to her annoyance and not much to his own joy. She so obviously disliked him, and, pretty as she was, he could have looked at her just as well from across the table. Better, in fact. You can’t look much at your dinner partner; it is so marked to turn round at right angles—at least in the early stages of the dinner.

At first the conversation was colourless, and included their neighbours on either hand. He was trying not to say things which might irritate her, and she was doing her best to be less transparently young than that other night. The result was that superficially they got on better, and each was a little interested—intrigué expresses it more nearly—by the other. It was the sense of “something in reserve.” The talk had been so peaceful that Tony felt it quite natural to go over to her when the men came up to the drawing-room afterwards. “She has a dear little face,” he thought, “and she isn’t affected, anyway, like most of these.”

It really would have been much better if he had kept away. Some innocent remark of Pamela’s as the “old families” opened the unfortunate subject again.