The whole man had changed.  The eyes had a timid pleading in them.

Joan laughed.  “I’ve been feeling as if I were the King of Bavaria,” she said.

“How did he feel?” he asked her, leaning forward.

“He had his own private theatre,” Joan explained, “where Wagner gave his operas.  And the King was the sole audience.”

“I should have hated that,” he said, “if I had been Wagner.”

He looked at her, and a flush passed over his boyish face.

“All right,” he said, “if it had been a queen.”

Joan found herself tracing patterns with her spoon upon the tablecloth.  “But you have won now,” she said, still absorbed apparently with her drawing, “you are going to get your chance.”

He gave a short laugh.  “A trick,” he said, “to weaken me.  They think to shave my locks; show me to the people bound by their red tape.  To put it another way, a rat among the terriers.”

Joan laughed.  “You don’t somehow suggest the rat,” she said:  “rather another sort of beast.”

“What do you advise me?” he asked.  “I haven’t decided yet.”

They were speaking in whispered tones.  Through the open doors they could see into the other room.  Mrs. Phillips, under Airlie’s instructions, was venturing upon a cigarette.

“To accept,” she answered.  “They won’t influence you—­the terriers, as you call them.  You are too strong.  It is you who will sway them.  It isn’t as if you were a mere agitator.  Take this opportunity of showing them that you can build, plan, organize; that you were meant to be a ruler.  You can’t succeed without them, as things are.  You’ve got to win them over.  Prove to them that they can trust you.”

He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before speaking.

“It’s the frills and flummery part of it that frightens me,” he said.  “You wouldn’t think that sensitiveness was my weak point.  But it is.  I’ve stood up to a Birmingham mob that was waiting to lynch me and enjoyed the experience; but I’d run ten miles rather than face a drawing-room of well-dressed people with their masked faces and ironic courtesies.  It leaves me for days feeling like a lobster that has lost its shell.”

“I wouldn’t say it, if I didn’t mean it,” answered Joan; “but you haven’t got to trouble yourself about that . . .  You’re quite passable.”  She smiled.  It seemed to her that most women would find him more than passable.

He shook his head.  “With you,” he said.  “There’s something about you that makes one ashamed of worrying about the little things.  But the others:  the sneering women and the men who wink over their shoulder while they talk to you, I shall never be able to get away from them, and, of course, wherever I go—­”

He stopped abruptly with a sudden tightening of the lips.  Joan followed his eyes.  Mrs. Phillips had swallowed the smoke and was giggling and spluttering by turns.  The yellow ostrich feather had worked itself loose and was rocking to and fro as if in a fit of laughter of its own.