And what on earth could have tempted Anne to let him kiss her, if she had not been a crafty, worldly-minded schemer with an eye on the glories of ruling at the Hall?
It is true that I did not actually see him kiss her. I turned away too quickly. But the grouping left me in no doubt that if he had not kissed her already, he was on the point of doing it. In any case he had had his arm round her, and she had shown no signs of resisting him.
My first impression of the curious change in demeanour shown towards me by the Jervaises and their friends at lunch was that it had no existence outside my own recently embittered mind. I thought that I was avoiding them, not that they were avoiding me. It was not until I condescended to come down from my pinnacle of conscious superiority that I realised my own disgrace.
My effort at conversation with Mrs. Jervaise was a mere act of politeness.
"I'm afraid you were rather late this morning," I said. It was not, perhaps, a tactful remark, but I could think of nothing else. All the church-party were stiff with the slightly peevish righteousness of those who have fulfilled a duty contrary to their real inclinations.
Mrs. Jervaise lifted her nose savagely. No doubt her head went with it, but only the nose was important.
"Very late, Mr. Melhuish," she said, stared at me as if debating whether she would not instantly give me the coup de grace, and then dipped again to the threat of the imaginary doorway.
"Mr. Sturton give you a good sermon?" I continued, still suffering from the delusion that I was graciously overlooking their obvious inferiority to myself.
"He is a very able man; very able," Mrs. Jervaise said, this time without looking up.
"You are lucky to have such a good man as vicar," I said. "Sometimes there is--well, a lack of sympathy between the Vicarage and the Hall. I remember--the case isn't quite parallel, of course, but the moral is much the same--I remember a curate my father had once..."
Now, my story of that curate is thoroughly sound. It is full of incident and humour and not at all derogatory to the prestige of the church. I have been asked for it, more than once, by hostesses. And though I am rather sick of it myself, I still fall back on it in cases of such urgency as I judged the present one to be. I thought that I had been lucky to get so easy an opening to produce the anecdote with relevance, and I counted on it for a good five minutes relief from the constraint of making polite conversation.