But it was a quiet passion which bored nobody, not even his wife.

When conversation became general, with Querida as the centre around which it eddied, Neville, who had seated himself on the gray stone parapet near his sister, said in a low voice: 

“Well, how goes it, Lily?”

“All right,” she replied with boyish directness, but in the same low tone.  “Mother and father have spent a week with us.  You saw them in town?”

“Of course.  I’ll run up to Spindrift House to see them as often as I can this summer....  How’s the kid?”

“Fine.  Do you want to see him?”

“Yes, I’d like to.”

His sister caught his hand, jumped up, and led him into the house to the nursery where a normal and in nowise extraordinary specimen of infancy reposed in a cradle, pink with slumber, one thumb inserted in its mouth.

“Isn’t he a wonder,” murmured Neville, venturing to release the thumb.

The young mother bent over, examining her offspring in all the eloquent silence of pride unutterable.  After a little while she said:  “I’ve got to feed him.  Go back to the others, Louis, and say I’ll be down after a while.”

He sauntered back through the comfortable but modest house, glancing absently about him on his way to the terrace, nodding to familiar faces among the servants, stopping to inspect a sketch of his own which he had done long ago and which his sister loved and he hated.

“Rotten,” he murmured—­“it has an innocence about it that is actually more offensive than stupidity.”

On the terrace Stephanie Swift came over to him: 

“Do you want a single at tennis, Louis?  The others are hot for Bridge—­except Gordon Collis—­and he is going to dicker with a farmer over some land he wants to buy.”

Neville looked at the others: 

“Do you mean to say that you people are going to sit here all hunched up around a table on a glorious day like this?”

“We are,” said Alexander Cameron, calmly breaking the seal of two fresh, packs.  “You artists have nothing to do for a living except to paint pretty models, and when the week end comes you’re in fine shape to caper and cut up didoes.  But we business men are too tired to go galumphing over the greensward when Saturday arrives.  It’s a wicker chair and a ‘high one,’ and peaceful and improving cards for ours.”

Alice Annan laughed and glanced at Querida degrees Cameron’s idea was her idea of what her brother Harry was doing for a living; but she wasn’t sure that Querida would think it either flattering or humorous.

But Jose Querida laughed, too, saying:  “Quite right, Mr. Cameron.  It’s only bluff with, us; we never work.  Life is one continual comic opera.”

“It’s a cinch,” murmured Cameron.  “Stocks and bonds are exciting, but your business puts it all over us.  Nobody would have to drive me to business every morning if there was a pretty model in a cosey studio awaiting me.”