Edmund had indeed only stayed with them long enough to leave a very marked impression of low spirits and irritation.  “What’s come to Grosse?” was asked by more than one guest of the hostess.

“I don’t know, but he really is impossible.  It’s partly because of Billy—­but I won’t condescend to explain that Billy proposed himself and I could not well refuse.”

Billy is the only one of this gay, quarrelsome little group that need be named here.  It was really partly on his account that Edmund so quickly left them to their gossip alternating with happy phrases of joy in the beauty of mountains and lakes, and to their quarrels alternating with moments of love-making, so avowedly brief that only an artist could believe in its exquisite enjoyment.  Neither Edmund nor Billy were really habitues of this Bohemian circle.  They both belonged to a more conventional social atmosphere; they were at once above and below the rest of the party.  The cause of antipathy to Billy on Sir Edmund’s part was a certain likeness in their lives—­contrasting with a most marked dissimilarity of character.

Sir Edmund could not say that Billy was a fool or a snob, because Billy did nothing but lead a perfectly useless life as expensively as possible; and he did the same himself.  He could not even say that Billy lived among fools and snobs, because many of Billy’s friends were his own friends too.  He could not say that Billy had been a coward because he had not volunteered to fight in the Boer war, because Sir Edmund had not volunteered himself.  He could not say that Billy employed the wrong tailor; it would show only gross ignorance or temper to say so.  But just the things in which he felt himself superior, utterly different in fact from Billy, were the stupid, priggish things that no one boasts of.  He read a good deal; he thought a good deal; he knew he might have had a future, and the bitterness of his heart lay in the fact that at fifteen years later in life than Billy he was still so completely a slave to all that Billy loved.  Every detail of their lives seemed to add to the irritation.  It was only the day he left London that he had discovered that Billy’s new motor was from the same maker as his own; in fact, except in colour, the motors were twins.  This was the latest, and not even the least, cause of annoyance.  For it betrayed what he was always trying to conceal from himself, that there appeared to be an actual rivalry between him and Billy, a petty, social, silly rivalry.  Billy, of simpler make, a fresher, younger, more contented animal, thought little of all this, and was irritated by Sir Edmund’s assumption of superiority.