self-possessed and elaborately genial and commonplace, but she knew him to be nervous by a little occasional clumsiness, by the faintest shadow of vulgarity in the urgency of his hospitality.  She wished he could smoke and dull his nerves a little.  A gust of irrational impatience blew through her being.  Well, they’d got to the pheasants, and in a little while he would smoke.  What was it she had expected?  Surely her moods were getting a little out of hand.

She wished her father and aunt would not enjoy their dinner with such quiet determination.  Her father and her husband, who had both been a little pale at their first encounter, were growing now just faintly flushed.  It was a pity people had to eat food.

“I suppose,” said her father, “I have read at least half the novels that have been at all successful during the last twenty years.  Three a week is my allowance, and, if I get short ones, four.  I change them in the morning at Cannon Street, and take my book as I come down.”

It occurred to her that she had never seen her father dining out before, never watched him critically as an equal.  To Capes he was almost deferential, and she had never seen him deferential in the old time, never.  The dinner was stranger than she had ever anticipated.  It was as if she had grown right past her father into something older and of infinitely wider outlook, as if he had always been unsuspectedly a flattened figure, and now she had discovered him from the other side.

It was a great relief to arrive at last at that pause when she could say to her aunt, “Now, dear?” and rise and hold back the curtain through the archway.  Capes and her father stood up, and her father made a belated movement toward the curtain.  She realized that he was the sort of man one does not think much about at dinners.  And Capes was thinking that his wife was a supremely beautiful woman.  He reached a silver cigar and cigarette box from the sideboard and put it before his father-in-law, and for a time the preliminaries of smoking occupied them both.  Then Capes flittered to the hearthrug and poked the fire, stood up, and turned about.  “Ann Veronica is looking very well, don’t you think?” he said, a little awkwardly.

“Very,” said Mr. Stanley.  “Very,” and cracked a walnut appreciatively.

“Life—­things—­I don’t think her prospects now—­Hopeful outlook.”

“You were in a difficult position,” Mr. Stanley pronounced, and seemed to hesitate whether he had not gone too far.  He looked at his port wine as though that tawny ruby contained the solution of the matter.  “All’s well that ends well,” he said; “and the less one says about things the better.”

“Of course,” said Capes, and threw a newly lit cigar into the fire through sheer nervousness.  “Have some more port wine, sir?”

“It’s a very sound wine,” said Mr. Stanley, consenting with dignity.

“Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think,” said Capes, clinging, because of a preconceived plan, to the suppressed topic.