to keep him from reading his blooming play to me!" he added,
turning to Henry.

5

He had a sense of disappointment when he met Mary. In his reaction from
Sheila Morgan, he had imagined Mary coming to greet him with something
of the alert youthfulness with which she had met him when he first
visited Boveyhayne, but when she came into the hall, a book in
her hand, he felt that there was some stiffness in her manner, a
self-consciousness which had not been there before.

"How do you do?" she said, offering her hand to him like any well-bred
girl.

She did not call him "Quinny" or show in her manner or speech that he
was particularly welcome to her.

"I suppose," he thought to himself, "she's cross because I didn't answer
her letter!"

He resolved that he would bring her back to her old friendliness....

"I expect you're tired," she said. "We'll have tea in a minute or two.
Mother's lying down. She's not very well!"

She would have said as much to a casual acquaintance, Henry thought.

"Not well!" he heard Ninian saying. "What's the matter with her?"

"She's tired. I think she's got a headache. There was a letter from
Uncle Peter!" Mary answered, and her tone indicated that the letter from
Uncle Peter accounted for everything.

"Oh!" said Ninian, scowling and turning away.

They went into the drawing-room to tea, and Henry had a sense of
intruding on family affairs, mingled with his disappointment because
Mary was not as he had expected her to be. It might be, of course, that
the letter from Uncle Peter had affected Mary almost as much as it
seemed to have affected Mrs. Graham, and that presently she would be as
natural as she had been that other time ... but then he remembered that
Gilbert had said that she was "being very femaley at present." She
poured out tea for them as if she were a new governess, and she reproved
Ninian once for saying "Damn!" when he dropped his bread and butter....

"Mary's turned pi!" said Ninian.

She frowned at him and told him not to be silly.

"She calls the Communion Service the Eucharist, and crosses herself and
flops and bows!..."

"You're very absurd, Ninian!" she said.

Almost unconsciously, he began to compare her to Sheila Morgan. He
remembered the free, natural ways of Sheila, and liked them better than
these new, mannered ways of Mary. How could any one prefer this
stiltedness to that ease, this self-consciousness to that state of being
unaware of self?... In