Vyvian greeted him huffily.  It needed all Peter’s feeling for a hurt man to make him anything but distantly aloof.  Cheriton’s description was so manifestly correct.  The man was a cad—­an oily bounder with a poisonous mind.  Peter wondered how Hilary could bear to have his help on the Gem.

Vyvian broke out about Cheriton.

“Did you see that grand fellow who was too proud to know me?  Driven you away too, has he?  We don’t know people in boarding-houses—­we’re in our private flat ourselves!  It makes me sick!”

But his vulgarity when he was angry was a shade less revolting, because more excusable, than when he wasn’t.  So Peter bore it, and even tried to be comforting, and to talk about pictures.  Vyvian really knew something about art; Peter was a little surprised to find that he knew so much, remembering certain curious blunders of his in the Gem.

He did not talk about the Gem to Vyvian; instinctively he avoided it.  Peter had a rather useful power of barring his mind against thoughts that he did not desire to have there; without reasoning about it, he had placed the Gem in this category.

He was absently watching the dim blue of the Euganean Hills against the clearer blue of the sky when he discovered that Vyvian was talking about Rhoda Johnson.

“A dear little gurl, with real possibilities, if one could develop them.  I do my best.  She’s fond enough of me to let me mould her atrocious taste.  But what can one do to fight the lifelong influence of a home like that—­a mother like that?  Oh, frightful!  But she is fond of me, and there’s her hope—­”

“Good-bye,” said Peter.  “I must go.”  He could not for the life of him have said any of the other things he was thinking.  He would have given a lot to have been Cheriton for the moment, so that he wouldn’t mind being rude and violent.  It was horribly feeble; all he could say was “Good-bye.”  Having said it, he went abruptly.

He sighed as he went back to Urquhart and Leslie.  Things were so difficult to manage.  One left one’s friends to comfort a hurt bounder; that was all very well, but what if the bounder comforted was much more offensive than the bounder hurt?  However, it was no good reasoning about these things.  Peter knew that one had to try and cheer up the hurt, in the face of all reason, simply because one felt so uncomfortable oneself if one didn’t.

But it was almost worth while to have a few rather revolting people about; they threw the others into such glorious relief.  As long as there were the nice people, who laughed at life and themselves, playing about the world, nothing else in particular mattered.  And it was really extraordinarily good luck that Urquhart should happen to be playing about Venice at the same time as Peter.  In spite of Cheriton, they would have a good time together.  And Cheriton would perhaps become friendly in time—­dear Jim, with his queer manners.  People mostly did become friendly, in quite a short time, according to Peter’s experience.