Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in Miss Triscoe’s mind.

“Then you don’t feel that it was a very distinct success?” her husband asked on his return.

“Not on the surface,” she said.

“Better let ill enough alone,” he advised.

She did not heed him.  “All the same she cares for him.  The very fact that she was so cold shows that.”

“And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?”

“If she wants it to.”

XIV.

At dinner that day the question of ‘The Maiden Knight’ was debated among the noises and silences of the band.  Young Mrs. Leffers had brought the book to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it down before the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading it to her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon.

“Don’t you think it’s perfectly fascinating,” she asked Mrs. Adding, with her petted mouth.

“Well,” said the widow, doubtfully, “it’s nearly a week since I read it, and I’ve had time to get over the glow.”

“Oh, I could just read it forever!” the bride exclaimed.

“I like a book,” said her husband, “that takes me out of myself.  I don’t want to think when I’m reading.”

March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected in time that Mr. Leffers had really stated his own motive in reading.  He compromised.  “Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me.”

“Yes,” said the other, “that is what I mean.”

“The question is whether ‘The Maiden Knight’ fellow does it,” said Kenby, taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.

“What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be single-handed,” said March.

“No,” his wife corrected him, “what a man thinks she can.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, “that we’re like the English in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder.”

“If you’ll say a row of bricks,” March assented, “I’ll agree with you.  It’s certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get going.  It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in the popularity of a given book.”

“It’s like the run of a song, isn’t it?” Kenby suggested.  “You can’t stand either, when it reaches a given point.”

He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest of the table.

“It’s very curious,” March said.  “The book or the song catches a mood, or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted—­”

“The discouraging part is,” Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the Marches, “that it’s never a question of real taste.  The things that go down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar palate—­Now in France, for instance,” he suggested.