A sort of gasp broke from Lady Richard's lips; she gazed helplessly at her friends. Fanny began to laugh. May preserved a meditative seriousness; she seemed to be reviewing Quisanté's efforts in a judicial spirit.
"Well?" said Lady Richard after the proper pause.
"Oh well, he was atrocious, of course," May admitted; her tone, however, expressed a reluctant homage to truth rather than any resentment. "He doesn't know how to do it in the least."
"He doesn't know how to do anything," Lady Richard declared.
"Most men are either elephantine or serpentine," said Fanny. "Which was he, dear?"
"No. I haven't got an animal for him. Well, yes, he was a little weaselly perhaps. But----" She glanced at Lady Richard as she paused, and then appeared to think that she would say no more; she frowned slightly and then smiled.
"I like his cheek!" exclaimed Fanny with a simplicity that had survived the schoolroom.
Lady Richard screwed her small straight features into wrinkles of disgust and a shrug seemed to run all over her little trim smartly-gowned figure; no presumption could astonish her in Quisanté.
"Why in the world did you listen to him, May?" Fanny went on.
"He interested me. And every now and then he was objectionable in rather an original way."
With another shrug, inspired this time by her friend's mental vagaries, Lady Richard diverged to another point.
"And that was where you were all the time Weston Marchmont was looking for you?" she asked.
May began to laugh. "Somehow I'm generally somewhere else when Mr. Marchmont looks for me," she said. "It isn't deliberate, really; I like him very much, but when he comes near me, some perverse fate seems to set my legs moving in the opposite direction."
"Well, Alexander Quisanté's a perverse fate, if you like," said Lady Richard.
"It's curious how there are people one's like that towards. You're very fond of them, but it seems quite certain that you'll never get much nearer to them. Is it fate? Or is it that in the end there's a--a solution of sympathy, a break somewhere, so that you stop just short of finding them absolutely satisfying?"
Neither of her friends answered her. Lady Richard did not deal in speculations; Fanny preferred not to discuss, even indirectly, her sister's feelings towards Marchmont; they bred in her a mixture of resentment and relief too complicated for public reference. It was certainly true enough that he and May got no nearer to one another; if the break referred to existed somewhere, its effect was very plain; how could it display itself more strikingly than in making the lady prefer Quisanté's weaselly flirtation to the accomplished and enviable homage of Weston Marchmont? And preferred it she had, for one hour of life at least. Fanny felt the anger which we suffer when another shows indifference towards what we should consider great good fortune.