But Jacqueline needed no counteraction. Freke, who read her perfectly, was secretly amused, and annoyed as well, when he saw that Jacqueline was every moment more carried away by Throckmorton's wax-candles and carved chairs and embroidered screens and onyx tables, and glass and plate. He felt not one thrill of the jealousy of Throckmorton, where Jacqueline was concerned, that Throckmorton sometimes felt for him, because he was infinitely more astute in the knowledge of human and especially feminine weaknesses and follies; and he saw that the chairs and tables at Millenbeck were much more fascinating to Jacqueline than Throckmorton with his matured grace, his manly dignity. Freke, too, having long since worn out his emotions, except that slight lapse as regarded Judith, for whom he always _felt_ something--admiration, or pity, or a desire to be revenged--had an acute judgment of women which was quite unbiased by the way any particular woman treated or felt toward him. Judith, although she hated him, and he frankly admitted she had cause to, he ranked infinitely above Jacqueline. He had seen, long before, that Jacqueline, if she ever seriously tried, could draw Throckmorton by a thread, and it gave Freke a certain contempt for Throckmorton's taste and perception. Any man who could prefer Jacqueline to Judith was, in Freke's esteem, wanting in taste; for, after all, he considered these things more as matters of taste than anything else.
The dinner was very merry. When the general had told his fifth long-winded story of his adventures and hair-breadth escapes during the war, Mrs. Temple, with a glance, shut him up. Freke was in his element at a dinner-table, and told some ridiculous stories about the straits to which he had been reduced during his seven years' absence in Europe--"when," as he explained "my laudable desire to acquire knowledge and virtue threatened to be balked at every moment by my uncle getting me home. However, I managed to stay." He told with much gravity how he had been occasionally reduced to his fiddle for means of raising the wind, and had figured in concert programmes as Signor Tempolino, at which stories all shouted with laughter except Mrs. Temple and the general--Mrs. Temple sighing, and the general scowling prodigiously. Edmund Morford, who was afraid that laughing was injurious to his dignity, tried not to smile, but Freke was too comical for him.