ad known one or two of the higher dons. One he had
done at Cambridge quite recently. "The inns are better than they are at
Oxford, which is not saying very much, but the place struck me as being
changed. The men seemed younger...."

The burden of the conversation fell upon Lady Marayne. She looked
extraordinarily like a flower to Billy, a little diamond buckle on a
black velvet band glittered between the two masses of butter-coloured
hair that flowed back from her forehead, her head was poised on the
prettiest neck conceivable, and her shapely little shoulders and her
shapely little arms came decidedly but pleasantly out of a softness and
sparkle of white and silver and old rose. She talked what sounded like
innocent commonplaces a little spiced by whim, though indeed each remark
had an exploratory quality, and her soft blue eyes rested ever and again
upon Billy's white tie. It seemed she did so by the merest inadvertency,
but it made the young man wish he had after all borrowed a black one
from Benham. But the manservant who had put his things out had put it
out, and he hadn't been quite sure. Also she noted all the little things
he did with fork and spoon and glass. She gave him an unusual sense of
being brightly, accurately and completely visible.

Chexington, it seemed to Billy, was done with a large and costly and
easy completeness. The table with its silver and flowers was much more
beautifully done than any table he had sat at before, and in the dimness
beyond the brightness there were two men to wait on the four of them.
The old grey butler was really wonderfully good....

"You shoot, Mr. Prothero?"

"You hunt, Mr. Prothero?"

"You know Scotland well, Mr. Prothero?"

These questions disturbed Prothero. He did not shoot, he did not hunt,
he did not go to Scotland for the grouse, he did not belong, and Lady
Marayne ought to have seen that he did not belong to the class that does
these things.

"You ride much, Mr. Prothero?"

Billy conceived a suspicion that these innocent inquiries were designed
to emphasize a contrast in his social quality. But he could not be sure.
One never could be sure with Lady Marayne. It might be just that she
did not understand the sort of man he was. And in that case ought he
to maintain the smooth social surface unbroken by pretending as far as
possible to be this kind of person, or ought he to make a sudden gap in
it by telling his realities. He evaded the shooting question an