But that catholic Guy had not seen that beautiful white mask between the tawny formal curls and the two amethysts for eyes. I have told him since that had he seen that mask he would have foreseen the little profit he might expect to derive for his friends from Iris’s presence at that dinner. I have told him how it was in my mind that night that nothing could move Iris, because it was as though in winning Napier she was winning the thirty years’ war of her life. The shameless lady had at last lopped off the limb that was called the shameful lady; and so she had come again out of the darkness to Napier, she had come again as the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams, and not all Guy’s Englishry could hold Napier now from following that enchanted whisper across the seas, that Iris March might at last come to fulfil her fate.
And yet, by the perfection of their normality over dinner, it might have been this person, me, who was being treacherous to his friends by fancying disloyalties among them! Shirley, for instance. Shirley, little sister to George Tarlyon, was of the same age as Venice, they had been at Heathfield together, they had always been together, and where Venice led there Shirley followed, and what Venice saw that Shirley saw, and where Venice raged there Shirley raged. And Venice was raging now. Oh, she must be raging frantically! Yet Shirley never once, as they say, “let on” about her state of mind. She was just Shirley all the time, sweet in a small way, sarcastic in a large way, Shirley of the brown eyes and unbreakable spirit, pretty Shirley. Maybe she was behaving a little better than was her general wont, for Shirley was so well-bred that she never practised what you would call deportment, but that was the only way the strain of that evening seemed to affect her. …
Exactly at what point, one wondered that evening, did behaviour become hypocrisy? For instance, Guy. There he sat, that knight of old beliefs, at our head, very gay in white flannels and a brilliant Fair Isle sweater, for all the world as though it was not already stifling enough, for all the world as though two people at his table hadn’t offended him on the one essential point of conduct by which Guy de Travest knew friends from strangers: never to give way to what you want to do, if honour tells you that you may not do it.
And Napier, that love-lost man! Love-lost, that man? Let me tell of a moment after dinner when Venice suddenly, tremendously, helplessly, cried to Iris: “Oh, dear Jesu, aren’t you lovely!” And Napier, at that moment gaiety itself, came suddenly between them, an arm round each of their shoulders. “Why, of course she is, Venice! I tell you, I was particular about my friends when I was young. …” It wasn’t, of course, voluntary, he was not thinking, Napier couldn’t think and then be a hypocrite: it was just the natural, normal sort of nonsense that happens. He had, at that moment, forgotten what he would have to tell Venice, tomorrow or the day after, of the love-philtre. And the child Venice! Venice, that very queen of hypocrites! Charming she was to Iris, just the tiniest bit deferential, as a girl of one-and-twenty might well be, but seldom is, to a woman of thirty. And yet Venice, ever since that afternoon in Paris, had been, I knew, eating her heart fretting about Napier, fearful and jealous and racked by what she could not see of his heart, tremulous with terror and suspicion of that legendary playmate, that Iris March of long ago. And how she hated the idea of Iris, I knew well, how she hated the thing she thought Iris was—and wasn’t Iris just that!—with all the uncompromising savagery of her heart! Venice, O Venice! And once, over dinner, she whispered to me: “I like Mrs. Storm.”
I don’t know, of course, but I suppose that in saying nothing one
