He did not pretend to be reading; frankly he was watching her, everything she did, and she became jerky. She looked away from the telephone. She rose and paced toward the fireplace, airily swinging her hands, trying to think of any reason why she should go to the fireplace. She moved the brass Buddha on the mantelpiece two inches to the right; she felt her father’s condemnatory glance scorching her back, and hastily she moved Buddha back again. With a fine fingertip, she smoothed the cool glossy cover of a garden magazine — and peeped at the telephone.

Her fingers wandered through the poems of Yeats; the old edition, with the cross and the mystic rose and falling leaves upon the cover, which her father had brought home from London thirty years ago and which, after her mother’s death, he had been wont to read to her until suddenly she had awakened to the charm of the lines, at which he immediately became impatient of them, said they were sentimental, for milk-sick girls, and threw the book on the floor. She had picked it up and defiantly treasured it.

He was half sneering at her now as she read again:

. . . the land of faery

Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,

Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,

Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;

And she is still there, busied with a dance,

Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,

Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.

Again she looked toward the telephone, and he spoke suavely, like a man superior to all emotion:

‘It would be obvious, wouldn’t it, Ann, that you are expecting a telephone call from this bloated young bruiser, Cornplow, this study in the mind of primitive man, whom you have been seeing lately?’

‘He isn’t bloated. But I am expecting him to phone . . .’

‘The word is “telephone”.’

‘ . . . or to drop in.’

‘Drop into what? The speech of youth today is very picturesque. It lacks only one thing that speech normally should have — an intelligible meaning . . .’

She was screaming.

‘Stop, stop, stop, stop! Dear God, I get so sick of your making spider webs of words that choke me! Howard IS simple! That’s one reason I like him! He’s like daylight and fresh air, and this place is like a dungeon!’

‘I trust you like his family, also — they are certainly on the simple, fresh-airish side.’

‘I do! Especially his father. There’s such nice wiggly lines beside his eyes, where he laughs. And you dare to patronize him! Oh, I do hate you!’

‘Are you quite sure, my dear Ann? I suspect that, at least, my superciliousness will keep you from making a fool of yourself . . .’

And then, astonishingly, Howard was ringing the doorbell. After her father’s wry, dark, feline teasing, the young man seemed to Annabel like a jolly St. Bernard. She clasped his solid chunk of a hand and towed him into the drawing-room.