She plumped for the baby, and wondered if the visit could conceivably be going to be a slight strain.  In old days there had always been a certain tenseness about their relationship, made worse by her attempts to topple over his gentlemanliness.  She had felt that if her wish could have been gratified just once, she would have been released from it and never have wanted to repeat the experiment.  Also a little of the responsibility would have been his—­thus obliterating the irritating daily spectacle of his untarnished blamelessness.

Of course he had never been in love with her.  She had always been buoyed up by little things she wouldn’t even have noticed in some one she hadn’t cared about.  If there were acute disquieting moments when the troublante quality of her loveliness tossed him about unmercifully—­weren’t they moments that any stranger might go through sitting next to her at dinner?  No—­the truth always had been that he was really fond of her.

“I’m glad now,” she smiled to herself, “how lucky that we can’t always sculpt our own relationships.”

She went down to dinner—­in the huge hall full of armchairs and cushions and antlers and comfort St. John stood with his back to the fire smoking a cigarette which he threw into the grate when he saw her (St. John invariably threw away his cigarette when you came into the room and then asked your permission to light a new one.  In her mind’s eye Ariadne always saw him opening the door for his wife after a violent scene with her).

“My dear,” she said, “what a divine house.”

“The wing you are sleeping in was built by the fifth Lord....

“The staircase was designed by....

“The mantelpieces in the drawing room....

“After dinner I will show you....”

Dinner was announced.

She tucked her hand under his arm.

“Are you going to take me in to dinner, St. John?”

“Of course,” he smiled at her.

The dining room was big enough to reduce the immense pieces of Georgian silver—­beautiful they were—­to reasonable proportions.

St. John said there were some very fine pieces of Queen Anne which he would show her.

“There was,” she murmured, “nothing like Queen Anne.”

The attentiveness of the footman and even of the butler did not seem to her to be entirely confined to their wants.

St. John asked her questions about India, which she answered as she answered travelling Europeans—­correctly, concisely, and without any frills of vocabulary.  It was quite possible, she reflected, that St. John wanted to know the answers to his questions.  That was the worst of being abroad so much, you were always either trying to tell things it bored people to hear, or else they were determined to hear things that it bored you to tell.  Her mind wandered to the curious tide-like quality of interest, the way it advanced and retreated in a conversation.