Munt laughed a man’s laugh.  “I guess he’s pretty well alive to that, if he’s in love with her.”

“Oh, in a certain way, of course, but not in the highest way.  Now, for instance, if he felt all her fineness as—­as we do, I don’t believe he’d be willing to appear before her just like that.”  The father of the gods wore a damask tablecloth of a pale golden hue and a classic pattern; his arms were bare, and rather absurdly white; on his feet a pair of lawn-tennis shoes had a very striking effect of sandals.

“It seems to me,” Miss Cotton pursued; “that if he really appreciated her in the highest way, he would wish never to do an undignified or trivial thing in her presence.”

“Oh, perhaps it’s that that pleases her in him.  They say we’re always taken with opposites.”

“Yes—­do you think so?” asked Miss Cotton.

The curtains were flung apart, and the Judgment of Paris followed rather tamely upon what had gone before, though the two young fellows who did Juno and Minerva were very amusing, and the dialogue was full of hits.  Some of the audience, an appreciative minority, were of opinion that Mavering and Miss Anderson surpassed themselves in it; she promised him the most beautiful and cultured wife in Greece.  “That settles it,” he answered.  They came out arm in arm, and Paris, having put on a striped tennis coat over his short-sleeved Greek tunic, moved round among the company for their congratulations, Venus ostentatiously showing the apple she had won.

“I can haydly keep from eating it,” she explained to Alice; before whom she dropped Mavering’s arm.  “I’m awfully hungry.  It’s hayd woyk.”

Alice stood with her head drawn back, looking at the excited girl with a smile, in which seemed to hover somewhere a latent bitterness.

Mavering, with a flushed face and a flying tongue, was exchanging sallies with her mother, who smothered him in flatteries.

Mrs. Trevor came toward the group, and announced supper.  “Mr. Paris, will you take Miss Aphrodite out?”

Miss Anderson swept a low bow of renunciation, and tacitly relinquished Mavering to Alice.

“Oh, no, no!” said Alice, shrinking back from him, with an intensification of her uncertain smile.  “A mere mortal?”

“Oh, how very good!” said Mrs. Trevor.

There began to be, without any one’s intending it, that sort of tacit misunderstanding which is all the worse because it can only follow upon a tacit understanding like that which had established itself between Alice and Mavering.  They laughed and joked together gaily about all that went on; they were perfectly good friends; he saw that she and her mother were promptly served; he brought them salad and ice-cream and coffee himself, only waiting officially upon Miss Anderson first, and Alice thanked him, with the politest deprecation of his devotion; but if their eyes met, it was defensively, and the security between them was gone.  Mavering vaguely felt the loss, without knowing how to retrieve it, and it made him go on more desperately with Miss Anderson.  He laughed and joked recklessly, and Alice began to mark a more explicit displeasure with her.  She made her mother go rather early.