Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent.  Was he going to accept that challenge?  She wanted him to, and yet she thought he would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated.  She waited almost breathless.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.  This was an acceptance.  This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned, was settled.

“You two plotters!” exclaimed Adelaide.  “For my part, I’m on Marty Burke’s side.  I hate to see wild creatures in cages.”

“Dangerous to side with wild beasts,” observed Vincent.

“Why?”

“They get the worst of it in the long run.”

Adelaide dropped her eyes.  It was exactly the right answer.  For a moment she felt his complete supremacy.  Then another thought shot through her mind:  it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.

In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged role of spectator.  He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs. Wayne, he said, with his politest smile: 

“How are the bridges?”

“Oh, dear,” she answered, “I must have been terribly tactless—­to make you so angry.”

Mr. Lanley drew himself up.

“I was not angry,” he said.

She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.

“You gave me the impression of being.”

The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been inaccurate.

“Of course I was angry,” he said.  “What I mean is that I don’t understand why I was.”

Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind faces which they felt were mask-like.

Farron looked down the table at his wife.  Why, he wondered, did she want to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?

When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the utmost clearness: 

“And what was that magazine you spoke of?”

She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever, rather wicked idea.  He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes, but she enjoyed it.

“Wasn’t it this?” she asked, with a beating heart.

They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like absorption.

“I haven’t any idea what it is,” she whispered.

“Oh, well, I suppose there’s something or other in it.”

“I think your mother is perfectly wonderful—­wonderful.”

“I love you so.”

The older people took a little longer to settle down.  Mr. Lanley stood on the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far back.  Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph.  Farron was silent.  Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot.  The two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.