towards the other room, where they could hear bursts of cultivated laughter—“must take up a lot of time.”
She looked at him expectantly, as if between them they were decorating a small figure of herself, and she saw him hesitating in the disposition of some bow or sash.
“You’ve got it very nearly right,” she said, “but I only help my mother. I don’t write myself.”
“Do you do anything yourself?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “I don’t leave the house at ten and come back at six.”
“I don’t mean that.”
Mr. Denham had recovered his self–control; he spoke with a quietness which made Katharine rather anxious that he should explain himself, but at the same time she wished to annoy him, to waft him away from her on some light current of ridicule or satire, as she was wont to do with these intermittent young men of her father’s.
“Nobody ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,” she remarked. “You see”—she tapped the volume of her grandfather’s poems—“we don’t even print as well as they did, and as for poets or painters or novelists—there are none; so, at any rate, I’m not singular.”
“No, we haven’t any great men,” Denham replied. “I’m very glad that we haven’t. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.”
Katharine opened her lips and drew in her breath, as if to reply with equal vigor, when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her attention, and they both became conscious that the voices, which had been rising and falling round the tea–table, had fallen silent; the light, even, seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilbery appeared in the doorway of the ante–room. She stood looking at them with a smile of expectancy on
