"It is hard to explain." She paused a moment. "These people are delightful; you know I like them as much as you do."
MacBirney took his cigar from his mouth to express his surprise. "I thought you were crazy about the place and the people and everything else," he exclaimed. "I thought this was just what you were looking for! You’ve said so much about refined luxury and lovely manners----"
"I am thinking of all that." There was enough in her tone of an intention to be heard to cause him to forget his favorite expedient of drowning the subject in a flood of words. "But with all this, or to enjoy it all, one needs peace of mind, and my peace of mind is becoming disturbed."
Quite misunderstanding her, MacBirney thought she referred to the question of church-going, and that subject offered so much delicate ground that Alice continued without molestation.
"It is very hard to say what I meant to say, without saying too little or too much. You know, Walter, you were worried at one time about how Mr. Robert Kimberly would look at your proposals, and you told me you wanted me to be agreeable to him. And without treating him differently from any one else here, I have tried to pay particular regard to what he had to say and everything of that kind. It is awfully hard to specify," she hesitated in perplexity. "I am sure I haven’t discriminated him in any way from his brother, or Mr. De Castro, for instance. But I have always shown an interest in things he had to point out, and he seemed to enjoy--perhaps more than the others--pointing things out. And----"
"It seems to me now as if he has begun to take an interest in everything _I_ do----"
Her husband became jocular. "Oh, has he?"
Alice’s words came at last bluntly. "And it completely upsets me, Walter."
She took refuge in a shade of annoyance. "Because I don’t like to think about it."
"About any man’s--if I must say it--paying attention to me, except my husband."
"Now you are hitting me, aren’t you, Alice? You are pretty clever, after all," declared MacBirney still laughing.
She threw herself back in her chair. "Oh, Walter, you don’t understand at all! Nothing could be further from what I am thinking. I ought not to say he has been attentive enough to speak of. It is not that I dislike Mr. Kimberly. But he does somehow make me uncomfortable. Perhaps I don’t understand their way here."