you won't talk to Antonia about those sort of things."

Shelton raised his eyebrows.

"Oh, you know what I mean!"

He saw that to press Mrs. Dennant to say what she meant by "things"
would really hurt her sense of form; it would be cruel to force her thus
below the surface!

He therefore said, "Quite so!"

To his extreme surprise, flushing the peculiar and pathetic flush of
women past their prime, she drawled out:

"About the poor--and criminals--and marriages--there was that wedding,
don't you know?"

Shelton bowed his head. Motherhood had been too strong for her; in her
maternal flutter she had committed the solecism of touching in so many
words on "things."

"Does n't she really see the fun," he thought, "in one man dining out of
gold and another dining in the gutter; or in two married people living
on together in perfect discord 'pour encourages les autres', or in
worshipping Jesus Christ and claiming all her rights at the same time;
or in despising foreigners because they are foreigners; or in war; or in
anything that is funny?" But he did her a certain amount of justice by
recognising that this was natural, since her whole life had been passed
in trying not to see the fun in all these things.

But Antonia stood smiling in the doorway. Brilliant and gay she looked,
yet resentful, as if she knew they had been talking of her. She sat down
by Shelton's side, and began asking him about the youthful foreigner
whom he had spoken of; and her eyes made him doubt whether she, too, saw
the fun that lay in one human being patronising others.

"But I suppose he's really good," she said, "I mean, all those things he
told you about were only--"

"Good!" he answered, fidgeting; "I don't really know what the word
means."

Her eyes clouded. "Dick, how can you?" they seemed to say.

Shelton stroked her sleeve.

"Tell us about Mr. Crocker," she said, taking no heed of his caress.

"The lunatic!" he said.

"Lunatic! Why, in your letters he was splendid."

"So he is," said Shelton, half ashamed; "he's not a bit mad,
really--that is, I only wish I were half as mad."

"Who's that mad?" queried Mrs. Dennant from behind the urn--"Tom
Crocker? Ah, yes! I knew his mother; she was a Springer."

"Did he do it in the week?" said Thea, appearing in the window with a
kitten.

"I don't know," Shelton was obliged to answer.

Thea shook back her hair.

"I call it awfully slack of you not to have found out," she said.