The morning had not passed pleasantly for many members of the Penhallow family. Whatever gossip might be rife in the kitchen on the subject of Raymond’s quarrel with his father, no echo of this reached the family, no one, in fact, having the least idea that a quarrel had taken place; but there were troubles enough besides that to agitate the household. Vivian, who had come down late to breakfast, when only Clara, Conrad, Aubrey and Charmian still sat round the table, had rather unaccountably created a scene, during the course of which she had not only favoured those of the Penhallows who were present with her full and frank opinion of their manners, morals, and habits, but had launched forth into a diatribe against Penhallow himself, and had ended by declaring hysterically that if she did not soon escape from Trevellin she would go mad. After that, she had slapped Conrad’s face, because he laughed at her, and rushed out of the room, leaving her breakfast untouched. She was later heard, wildly sobbing, in the library, to which apartment it was conjectured that she had fled in the well-founded belief that few of the Penhallows were likely to enter it.
She left the dining-room party labouring under a strong feeling of surprise, for although she was known to be moody, she had never before been seen to lose all control over herself. The immediate cause of her outbreak seemed too trivial to warrant such a display of emotion. She had exploded with wrath at finding that Conrad had carelessly put a used plate (his own) in her place at the table, instead of removing it to the sideboard.
“And who shall blame her?” said Aubrey. “I do think that egg-stains are quite too alienating, don’t you? The twins simply have no sensibility at all.”
“But what’s she want to kick up such a shindy about?” demanded Conrad. “She’d only got to move it, hang it all! Anyone would think I’d put a live toad in her place!”
“I wouldn’t pay any attention to Vivian’s tantrums, if I were you,” Clara said. “I daresay she has her troubles.”
“She’s got Eugene, if that’s what you mean!”
“Is she starting a baby by any chance?” inquired Charmian, who was sitting with both elbows on the table, and her coffee-cup held between her hands.
Clara rubbed her nose. “Well, she hasn’t said anythin’ about it to me,” she said doubtfully. “Of course, that isn’t to say she isn’t, and it would account for her comin’ over squeamish, I daresay.”
“Oh, no!” said Aubrey imploringly. “Oh, Char darling, you don’t really think so, do you? I mean, what with Father being quite too gross for words, and the twins so terribly, terribly hearty, I don’t think I can bear any more! Shall you stay here for a whole week? I’m nearly sure I shan’t. It’s all so primitive, and vulgar, and I find that I definitely lack the herd-instinct, without which I quite see that it’s practically impossible to feel at home here.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway!” retorted Conrad, getting up from the table. “Considering that you affect the rest of us like a pain in the neck, the sooner you clear out the better!”
“Now, that’s enough!” Clara said mildly. “What with your father on the rampage, and now Vivian, we can’t do with any more nonsense.”
Conrad grimaced at her, and went away, but any hopes she or others might have entertained of spending the eve of Penhallow’s birthday in comparative peace were effectually put an end to, first by the discovery that Vivian was prolonging her attack of hysteria in the library; and next by the antics of Penhallow, who, as soon as he had recovered in some measure from the effects of Raymond’s assault upon him, proceeded to make his presence more than usually felt in the house. Knowing nothing of his father’s unpropitious mood, Clay was inspired to address an appeal to him, having nerved himself to take this desperate step by walking about the gardens for several hours, and rehearsing a convincing speech. Filial respect and manly determination were the predominant notes in the speech, as rehearsed, but since he was destined never to utter more than the opening phrases all his trouble was wasted. The very sight of his pallid countenance, nervously bobbing Adam’s apple, and unquiet hands exasperated Penhallow. He had always done what lay in his power to inspire his sons with dread of him, and had heartily despised any one of them who seemed to show that he had succeeded. Confronted by Clay, who was obviously terrified of him, and as obviously preparing to recite a set speech, he gave the fullest rein to his ill-humour, speedily reducing that unfortunate youth to a condition of stammering imbecility, tearing his character to shreds, trampling brutally over the tenderest spots in his sensibility, and dismissing him finally with a promise to take such steps as were requisite to turn him into a worthy member of the Penhallow family.
Emerging from his father’s room in a much shaken state, Clay fell into the arms of his half-sister, whom he encountered in the hall, and who promptly walked him out into the garden, and endeavoured, with the best possible motives, to instil resolution and self-reliance into him. But as he was of the type that responds only to encouragement mingled with a good deal of flattery, her methods, which were at once bracing and scornful, inspired him with nothing more than a desire to escape from her, coupled with a strong conviction that she did not understand him. He fled to his mother, and unburdened himself to her with so little reserve that it was not long before he had plunged her into a state of even greater desperation than his own.
Having passed one of her restless nights, Faith was late in coming downstairs. The hour which Clay had spent in her room had left her with a throbbing head; she felt her chief need was to be quiet, and was well aware that such a commodity was not to be found under the existing circumstances at Trevellin. The house seemed to teem with persons all more or less inimical to her; and as though it were not enough to find Eugene toying with an idea for an essay in the Yellow drawing-room, his wife viciously smoking cigarettes in the library, Clara mending stockings in the morning-room, and Charmian conducting an argumentative literary discussion with Aubrey in the hall, Myra had walked up from the Dower House to discover what plans had been made for Penhallow’s birthday party on the morrow. Myra had been in to see Penhallow, and gave it as her opinion that he was looking wonderful. As she had very little interest in anything beyond the walls of her own home, she hardly ever came into collision with her father-in-law, a circumstance which enabled her to face the thought of his amazing vitality with perfect equanimity.
“I always say,” she remarked brightly, “that he’ll see us all out! Of course, all the Penhallows are long-lived, aren’t they? I’m sure everyone thought his grandfather would die years and years before he did. He had everything in the world the matter with him, too. Of course, his father died young, but that was only because of a hunting accident.”
Faith barely repressed a shudder. Her sister-in-law replied placidly that she for one had never believed in half Penhallow’s ailments. She added that Dr Lifton might say what he liked, but that she knew her brother better than he did, and expected him to live for a good many years yet.
Faith could not listen to such a prognostication in silence. “If he did not drink so much!” she said. “Dr Lifton told me himself that no constitution could stand it!”
“Ah!” said Clara, rethreading her needle. “Time will show.”
Faith went out into the garden, murmuring that her head ached. The thought of perhaps having to endure years of the sort of purgatory she had been going through for months now was so appalling to her that she looked quite hunted, and indeed felt as though her reason were tottering. Since Aubrey’s return to the fold, the noise and the strife in the family seemed to have become augmented, not one of his brothers being able, apparently, to see him without making some belittling remark to which he promptly responded in kind. Such bickering had no effect upon Clara, who largely ignored it, but it preyed on Faith’s nerves to an extent that would have been quite incomprehensible to the Penhallows, had they had the least idea of it. More than ever, now that Aubrey had come and Loveday had betrayed her confidence, she found herself dreaming of the prettily furnished fiat in London which she hoped to share one day with Clay. It had become her escape from the turmoil of actuality, but sometimes it seemed to her that she would never realise her ambition until she had grown too old and weary to enjoy it.
Seated in the shade of a big tree on the lawn, she glanced towards the sprawling grey house, with its graceful Dutch gables, its chamfered windows, and high chimney-stacks, and remembered with a feeling almost of incredulity that she had once, long ago, exclaimed at its beauty, and thought herself fortunate to be its mistress.
The truth was, of course, that she had never been its mistress. No spirit ruled at Trevellin other than Penhallow’s, and the tyranny he exercised was so complete that it left no member of the household untouched. Brooding over it, she realised, with a little start (for she was so much in the habit of thinking her own sufferings unique that she had never considered whether the rest of the family might not suffer too, in their degrees), that it would not only be herself and Clay who would be released by Penhallow’s death from an intolerable bondage. There was Raymond, always at silent loggerheads with his father, and striving against the odds to husband the estate; there was Vivian, tied to a house and an existence she loathed, cheated of her right to her own home; there was Bart, baulked of a marriage which, however distasteful to his family, would probably turn out successfully; there was Aubrey, escaping for a little while only to be caught back again into his father’s toils. Perhaps, in the end, Charmian too would be forced to abandon the peculiar life she had chosen for herself. It did not seem likely, but anything, Faith thought, was possible when Penhallow jerked on the reins. But if he were to die, as the doctor had hinted that he would, every trouble would vanish, and they would be free, all of them: free to disperse, to follow their own inclinations; free from the fear of Penhallow’s wrath; free from their degrading dependence upon him for their livelihood. Bart would marry his Loveday, and take her to live at Trellick; Vivian would at last have Eugene to herself, to worship and to protect; Aubrey might pursue his exotic course undisturbed; and Raymond, coming after impatient years into his inheritance, would govern Trevellin without let or hindrance. And Clay, who was so much more important than any of them, would be saved from the grim future planned for him by Penhallow, for even if Penhallow left him nothing, there would be her own jointure, and on that he and she could live in peace and tolerable comfort while he made a name for himself with his pen.
She saw clearly that Penhallow’s death would be a universal panacea, and at once it seemed to her monstrous that he should lie there, in that fantastic room, year upon year, as no doubt he would, growing steadily more outrageous, wasting the estate, spoiling so many people’s lives, breeding dissension and misery amongst them, while they all, in their several ways, ate their hearts out. If only he would fulfil his doctor’s expectations, and drink himself to death! If only his unwise exertions might suddenly prove fatal! It would be, she thought dreamily, as though the house had been exorcised of an evil spirit. But he would not succumb to his follies, because nothing in this world ever happened as one prayed it might. He would go on, as his grandfather had before him, triumphantly overcoming the weakness of his diseased body, wearing them all out, until, in the end, when at last he died, they would not care for their freedom any more, because it had come to them too late.
She gave a little sob, and buried her face in her hands, but raised it again quickly as she heard footsteps approaching.
Aubrey was wandering across the lawn in her direction, a lock of his overlong hair flopping across his forehead. He wore a pair of very beautifully cut biscuit-coloured trousers, a pale green sports-shirt with short sleeves, suede shoes and a large silk handkerchief which he had knotted loosely round his neck in an extremely artless fashion, calculated to offend his brothers. A cameo ring adorned the hand which he waved airily at Faith, and there was just the suggestion of an expensive scent about him. He paused by the seat under the tree, and said in his light, high-pitched voice: “My dear, why did no one warn me that Father had gone gaga? Too unkind of you all! But definitely unhinged, darling!”
“What has he done now?” she asked wearily.
“It isn’t so much what he has done as what he would like to do. I’ve just sustained half-an-hour’s quite paralysing conversation — if you can call it that, for I’m sure I barely uttered — with him, in that grotesque room of his. Sweetie, why the Japanese screen of unparalleled meretriciousness, and why the tropical vegetation?”
“I don’t know. He takes fancies to things, and then he has them moved into his room.”
“But, precious, no one could take a fancy to an aspidistra!” Aubrey objected. “It’s like pampas grass — too dreadfully apocryphal! And is it absolutely necessary to his comfort to place crimson and scarlet side by side? I thought it was a trick of the candle-light last night, but it hit me the rudest blow when I most reluctantly entered the room this morning. Do you suppose that disgusting dog of his has eczema, or just fleas?”
She made a gesture of distaste. “Oh, don’t, Aubrey! I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”
“My dear, I do so agree with you! Quite too quelling. But you would never guess the insensate plan he has conceived for my future career! Would you believe it? — I’m to study afforestation!”
“Afforestation!” she repeated blankly.
“Oh, deforestation too! I mean, it’s definitely vertiginous! Couldn’t you have him certified?”
“But are you going to?” she asked.
“Sweet, is it likely? At my time of life, and with my sacred art to consider!”
“Did you tell him so?”
“No, darling, certainly not. I wouldn’t be so tactless. Besides, I’m terrified of Father. I was unequivocally assuaging. But I do see that I shall be compelled to do something wholly desperate. So vulgar! I do hate active aversions, don’t you? Just think of poor dear Char — oh, I am being nice to Char! You must forget I said that. Let its instantly talk of something else! Don’t you think dicre’s a weird fascination about Father? He always makes me think of Henry VIII, an entrancing creature, mid hardly more intimidating. There’s a Tudor lavishness about him, and a general air of recklessness quite anachronous to the sordid times we live in. I’ve got to go and cash a cheque for three hundred pounds for him in Bodmin. I mean, just like that! Something really awe-inspiring about that, don’t you think? Like lighting a cigarette with a five-pound note, which I have never been able to nerve myself to do, though I’ve tried, often. What can he possibly want with three hundred pounds, do you suppose?”
“He will squander it on things like that dreadful bed of his, or give it away, to people like Jimmy,” she replied bitterly.
“Of course I should have known that,” he agreed. “I don’t know how you feel about it, darling, but I do rather grudge it to Jimmy. One begins to appreciate the probable feelings of the legitimate offspring of such persons as Louis XIV, which somehow had never come home to one before.”
“If he has told you to cash the cheque, it must be because Raymond wouldn’t,” she warned him. “Raymond will be very angry if you do it.”
“Yes, lovely, I’m sure he will, but Father would be very angry if I didn’t, and of the two I prefer to face Ray,” he answered. “If you don’t see me again, it will either be because I have absconded with the money, or because I have failed to control that dreadful limousine. Good-bye, darling: do cheer up!”
He walked away from her with another wave of his hand. She remained under the shadow of the big tree for a long time, thinking that it was easy for him, here only on a visit and with no intention of remaining, to recommend her to be cheerful. If Penhallow succeeded in forcing him to live at Trevellin, he would speedily lose his insouciance. She wondered what he meant, if he meant anything, by his talk of doing something desperate. She wished with all her heart that he would do something desperate, desperate enough to enrage Penhallow into bursting a blood-vessel. No one could think it a crime to put an end to a life so baleful; indeed, if Penhallow’s brain were going, it would almost be a kindness. She leaned her head back against the rough tree-trunk, closing her eyes, and letting her imagination stray into that halcyon world which lay beyond Penhallow’s grave. It was so real to her, down to the smallest detail of that little flat in London, that when she was roused, much later, by the sound of the gong, lustily beaten by Reuben in the hall, she felt as though she had really escaped for a happy hour from Trevellin, and had been wrenched back with a sickening jolt.
Raymond did not come in to lunch, but Bart was present, and said that he did not know why Ray should not have returned, since as far as he knew, he had not had much to do that morning. Bart was out of spirits; ever since his interview with his father he had been restless, alternating between spurts of energy, and a moody listlessness until now foreign to his cheerful temperament. He hardly spoke until Aubrey entered the room, midway through the meal, and he for the first time beheld his attire. That did rouse him, and he expressed himself with brutal freedom. Eugene added his less brutal but more deadly mite, and as Charmian considered herself in honour bound to come to Aubrey’s support, the usual state of warfare soon reigned over the dining-room. Clay, who should have known better, joined in the condemnation of Aubrey’s sartorial taste and effeminate habits, and was promptly told by Bart that he was a cheeky young hound, and bidden to shut up. It was at this point that Faith began to cry, quite silently, but so uncontrollably that after a moment of biting her lips, and twisting her hands under the table, she got up, and hurried out of the room, leaving her pudding untouched on her plate.
“I suppose,”. said Vivian viciously, “that you’ll all of you be satisfied when you’ve driven Faith into a lunatic asylum!”
Bart looked a great deal surprised. “But what’s the matter with her? No one said anything to her!”
“You shouldn’t have set on Clay,” said his aunt. “You know she doesn’t like it. Not but what he shouldn’t criticise his elders.”
“Good lord, I only told him to shut up! Here, Clay, you’d better go after her, and tell her it’s all right! I didn’t mean to upset her.”
“Tell her you’ve kissed, with tears,” recommended Eugene, drawing a dish of strawberries towards him.
Charmian waited until Clay had left the room before delivering herself of her opinion. Then she said, leaning back in her chair, and driving one hand into the pocket of the slacks she was wearing: “It’s amazing to me that you none of you have the wit to see what’s happening under your noses. It’s my belief that Faith is heading for a nervous breakdown. I never saw her so much on edge in my life. She looks as though she hasn’t had a proper night’s rest for months.”
Eugene, who could not bear anyone to encroach on his prerogative, said with light contempt: “My dear Char, we have all been sufficiently bored by the recital of Faith’s so-called insomnia already. If she had ever been called upon to suffer one tenth of what I go through nightly, she might have some cause to complain!”
“There’s nothing whatsoever the matter with you, Eugene,” retorted his sister. “You are fast turning into a hypochondriac, and Vivian can apparently find nothing better to do than to encourage you. Don’t bother to rush to his defence, Vivian! I haven’t the slightest interest in either of you. But unless I’m much mistaken Faith has reached a breaking-point, and will probably have a complete collapse one of these days. When I look at her, I am reminded of the terrible time I went through with poor Leila once, when she had been living on her nerves for months, and they gave way under the strain.”
Bart broke into a roar of laughter. “Oh, gosh! I should think they damned well might! Anything would give way under the strain of having that lump of Turkish Delight living on it!”
Aubrey intervened before Charmian could blister Bart for this irreverence. “Of course, I don’t suppose any of you will be at all interested, but I must inform you that Faith is not the only person in this house threatened with a nervous breakdown. And I do hope that when I so far forget myself as to render this board untenable by bursting into tears at it, you will remember that I am not uncountable for my actions.”
“I expect,” said Clara wisely, “that she needs a change of air.”
Clay came back into the room, with the news that his mother was lying down, so no more was said. Faith reappeared at tea-time, but from the look of dismay which came into her face when she paused on the threshold of the Long drawing-room it was plain that she would not have done so had she been informed that Penhallow intended to make one of the tea-party.
He was wrapped in his aged dressing-gown, and it was evident that it had cost him an effort to get up at all. His eyes held a look of strain; his colour was bad; he eased himself in his wheeled chair from time to time, as though he were suffering a considerable degree of discomfort. He was quick to see Faith’s instinctive recoil. He said in his roughest, most derisive voice: “No, you wouldn’t have come down if you’d known you were going to find me here, would you? A fine wife you are! I might be dead for all the notice you ever take of me! Why haven’t you been near me all day? Eh? Why haven’t you?”
She could never accustom herself to being rated in public, and the colour rushed to her face as she answered in a low tone: “I have not been very well, Adam.”
He gave a sardonic bark of laughter at this. “Oh, you’ve not been very well!” he said, mimicking her. “That’s always your bleat!”
Bart crossed the room with a plate of sandwiches, which he offered to Penhallow. “Hit one of your own size, Guv’nor!” he said briefly.
Penhallow looked up at him under his brows. “You, for instance?”
Bart grinned. “Sure! Go ahead!”
Penhallow put up a hand, and pulled his ear. “Coming out as a champion, are you?” His glance swept the room, and alighted on Clay for an instant. He took a sandwich, and addressed his wife again. “I notice it isn’t your own brat who stands up for you, my dear,” he remarked.
Clay turned scarlet, and tried to look as though he had not heard this sally. It was at this moment that Raymond entered the room.
Penhallow forgot about his wife. He seemed to straighten himself in his chair when he saw Raymond. “Didn’t expect to find me up, did you?” he demanded challengingly.
Raymond’s face was always impassive; it showed no change of expression now. “I don’t know that I thought much about it either way,” he replied. He walked over to the table, and waited to receive his tea-cup from Clara’s hands.
“You’re lookin’ tired, Ray,” she remarked.
“I’m all right,” he responded shortly. Conscious of his father’s gaze, he looked up, and met it squarely, his jaw hardening a little. Penhallow grinned at him, but whether in mockery, or in appreciation of his self-command, it would have been difficult to say.
Penhallow began to stir his tea, in a way which made Aubrey exchange a pained glance with Charmian. “I shall sit up to dinner,” he announced.
This piece of intelligence was greeted with such a marked lack of enthusiasm that Aubrey felt it incumbent on him to say: “How lovely for us, Father dear!”
“I don’t know which of you gives me the worst bellyache, you or Clay!” said Penhallow, with a look of disgust. “I don’t want you slobbering over me!” His fiery glance again swept the room; his lip curled. “A nice, affectionate lot of children I’ve got!” he said scathingly.
“One hates to criticise Father,” murmured Eugene in his sister’s ear, “but one cannot but feel that to be a most unreasonable remark.”
“Considering you mean to sit up to dinner tomorrow, you’d better be in bed today, I should have thought,” said Clara.
“You keep your thoughts to yourself, old lady!” retorted Penhallow. “I daresay there’s a lot of you would like to see me keep my bed, but you’re going to be disappointed. By God, I’ve let you get so out of hand, the whole pack of you, it’s time I showed you who’s master at Trevellin!” He stabbed a finger at his wife. “And that goes for you too!” he said unnecessarily. “Don’t think you’re going to take to your bed with a headache, or any other such tomfoolery, because you’re not! And as for you,” he added, directing the accusing finger at Charmian, “you can make what kind of a guy of yourself you please in London, but you won’t do it here! You let me see you in those trousers again, and I’ll lay my stick across your bottom!”
“Oh, no, you won’t!” said Charmian, with a look quite as fierce as his. “You’ve no sort of control over me, so don’t you think it! I’m not dependent on you! I shan’t burst into tears because you choose to shout at me! You’ll get as good as you give if you go for me!”
“Oh, don’t! Please don’t!” Faith gasped, shrinking back in her chair involuntarily.
Neither of the combatants paid the slightest heed to her. Battle was fairly joined, and had anyone wished to speak it would have been quite impossible to have done so above the thunder of Penhallow’s voice and the fury of Charmian’s more strident accents. Eugene, lounging on a sofa, lay laughing at them both; Clara went on drinking her tea in perfect unconcern; Clay found that his hand was trembling so much that he was obliged to set his cup-and-saucer down on the table beside him; and Conrad, entering the room when the quarrel was at its height, promptly encouraged his sister by calling out: “Loo in, Char! Loo in, good bitch!”
Reuben Lanner, who had come in behind Conrad, crossed the room to his master’s chair, and shook his arm to attract his attention. “Shet your noise, Master, do!” he shouted in his ear.
Penhallow broke off in the middle of an extremely coarse description of his daughter’s character to say: “What do you want, you old fool?”
“It’s Mr Ottery wants to see you, Master. I’ve put un in the Yellow drawing-room.”
The rage died out of Penhallow’s enflamed countenance quite suddenly. An interested gleam came into his eyes; he turned them towards Raymond in a speculative glance; a slow grin dispersed the remnants of his scowl. “Phineas, eh?” he said. His great frame shook with a soundless laugh. “Well, that’s very interesting, damme if it isn’t! Show him in! What do you want to put him in the Yellow room for?”
“Because he wants to see you private, Master, that’s what for.”
“Why on earth?” demanded Conrad, staring at him.
Raymond, who had heard the message delivered with an imperceptible stiffening of his face, laid down his cup and-saucer, and said: “I’ll see him.”
“You’re a damned fool, Ray,” said his father, but with more amusement than annoyance in his tone. “So old Phineas wants to see me! Well, well, and why shouldn’t he? Push me into the Yellow room, Reuben.”
Raymond said no more. As Reuben pushed the wheeled chair forward, Penhallow put out a hand and grasped Charmian by the arm. “There, my girl! Give me a kiss! Damned if you don’t make me think of your mother when you fly into your tantrums, though God knows the messy way you live is enough to make her turn in her grave! But you’re a high-couraged filly, and that’s something!” He pulled her down as he spoke, gave her a noisy kiss, and a resounding spank, and let her go.
As soon as he had been pushed out of the room, speculation on the cause of Phineas’s visit broke out, his brothers looking inquiringly at Raymond, who said, however, that he had no more idea than they.
“Why, particularly, are you a "damned fool", Ray?” asked Eugene, a little curiosity in his eyes.
Raymond shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you order those buckets, Bart?”
“No, of course I didn’t. You said you’d attend to it yourself,” Bart replied, surprised.
“Oh!” Raymond coloured slightly. “All right: slipped my memory.”
“Good God, how are the mighty fallen!” exclaimed Conrad, folding a slice of bread-and-butter, and putting it into his mouth. “Chalk it up, somebody! The Great, the Methodical Ray has at last forgotten something he ought to have remembered! Keep it up, Ray: you’ll become quite human in time!”
Raymond smiled in a rather perfunctory way, and soon after left the room. Aubrey sighed audibly. “There is something more than oppressive about this house,” he said. “I expect you’re all quite used to it, but coming as I do from the beautiful peace of my own chambers it strikes me quite too dreadfully forcibly.” He described a vague gesture with his delicate hands. “I shan’t say that an evil influence appears to me to brood over the place, because I do think esoteric remarks of that nature are terribly embarrassing, don’t you? But you all seem to me to be a trifle more than life-size, and definitely febrile!”
“You’re perfectly right!” Charmian said. “But can you wonder at it?”
“No, my sweet. At least, I don’t mean to waste my time in trying. I’m just profoundly repelled. Something so deplorably indecorous about an uninhibited display of the more violent emotions, don’t you agree? Ah, no! How unremembering of me! You have just demonstrated to us, haven’t you, darling, that you don’t agree at all?”
As Eugene, who was as jealous of Aubrey’s clever tongue as he was of his success in the field of literature, began to engage him in a wordy duel, Faith got up, and quietly left the room.