And something in his manner would suggest a satisfaction, or a dissatisfaction with confidential mysteries.

He welcomed Billy Prothero in a colourless manner, and made conversation about Cambridge.  He had 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 anyhow.  He left it open for Lady Marayne and the venerable butler and Sir Godfrey and every one to suppose he just happened to be the sort of gentleman of leisure who doesn’t shoot.  He disavowed hunting, he made it appear he travelled when he travelled in directions other than Scotland.  But the fourth question brought him to bay.  He regarded his questioner with his small rufous eye.