"His manners. His ideas are all right, I suppose, but I'm getting rather tired of his platform-tricks." "His habit of illustration and so on?" "And his want of tact generally. In fact I'm not sure it isn't more than that. In a strange house it would have been simply a _faux pas_, but he knows us well enough, and the arrangement between us. He might at any rate wait till he's called in." Cosimo started on another nail.--"What arrangement?" he said. Again Amory gave him that look that might have told him that, though he might think that only a lot of money had gone, she knew that something far more vital had gone with it. "Do you mean that you didn't hear what he was saying about you and Britomart Belchamber?" "Yes, I heard that, of course. Of course I heard it." "Well?" "Well!" And this time their eyes met in a long look.... Cosimo had only himself to thank for what happened to him then. After all, you cannot watch a superb piece of female mechanism playing "Catching of Quails," and openly admire the way in which it can shut up like a clasp-knife and fold itself upon itself like a multiple lever, and pretend to be half in love with it lest sharp eyes should see that you are actually half in love with it, and take it for walks, and discuss Walter's Lectures with it, and tell it frequently how different things might have been had you been ten years younger, and warn it to be a good girl because of dangerous young men, and stroke its hair, and tell it what beautiful eyes it has, and kiss its hand from time to time, and walk with your arm protectingly about its waist, and so on and so forth, day after day--you cannot, after all, do these things and be entirely unflurried when your ever-so-slightly tiresome wife reminds you that, be it only by way of illustration, a young expert in such matters has coupled your name with that of the passive object of your philanderings. Nor can you reasonably be surprised when that wife gives you a long look, that doesn't reproach you for anything except for your stupidity or hypocrisy if you pretend not to understand, and then resumes her meditative gazing into a patent asbestos fire. Appearances _are_ for the moment against you. You can_not_ help for one moment seeing it as it must have appeared all the time to somebody else. Of course you know that you are in the right really, and the other person entirely wrong, and that with a little reasonableness on that other person's part you could make this perfectly clear; but you _are_ rather trapped, you know it, and the state of mind in which you find yourself is called by people who aren't anybody in particular "flurry." Which is perhaps rather a long way of saying that Cosimo was suddenly and entirely disconcerted.