For a good many seconds Marjorie was speechless. Could it be that conscious weakness--weakness in her, a Bartrand--hindered the girl from trusting her own voice? Then, giving Gaston her profile still, she turned brusquely aside from the Tintajeux roses and from the discussion of Geoffrey’s qualities. She remembered her grandfather’s dinner-hour. The sun was getting low. It would be only human to search for Mrs. Arbuthnot, and deliver her out of the hands of Lord Rex. ‘We shall find them perfectly happy, and eating ices,’ said Gaston. ‘Dinah’s is not such a critical spirit as yours, Miss Bartrand. Let us bend our steps to the refreshment tent.’ Dinah and Lord Rex were all this time advancing, haltingly, monosyllabically, towards acquaintanceship. Gaston’s happy many-sidedness, his power of adapting himself, without effort, to the tastes and moods of others, were gifts in no manner shared by Lord Rex Basire. Dinah’s intelligence differed about as widely from Marjorie Bartrand’s as does placid English moonlight from a flash of tropical lightning. Thus,--starting, as a cleverer man might do, along beaten tracks, the first remark made by Lord Rex was meteorological: ‘Splendid day this, isn’t it, for a rose-show?’ ‘Certainly.’ The chilling assent was not spoken for some seconds, Dinah’s education having failed to inform her that the smallest platitude uttered by men and women when they meet in the world needs instant answer. ‘As a rule, you see, one gets beastly weather for this sort of thing.’ Silence. ‘Festive gatherings, I mean, _und so weiter_. Speech-day at Eton was always the wettest day of the three hundred and sixty-five.’ ‘Was it indeed, Lord Rex Basire?’ Dinah’s gentle nature prompted her to be civil to all created beings. She would be civil, kindly even, to this plain and sun-scorched boy who had elected to walk beside her, and whose eyes took so many covert glances of admiration at her face. In the heart of Eve’s simplest daughter were such glances, one short quarter of an hour after introduction, ever registered as crime? Not only would Dinah be civil,--knowing little of titles, and less as to their modes of application, she would fain give Lord Rex Basire the fullest benefit of his. He paused, and doing so looked with a straighter gaze than heretofore at Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife. She was surpassingly beautiful, fairer than any woman he had seen with his fleshly eyes or dreamed about in such soul as he possessed. Was she stupid? Not one whit for the higher feminine intelligence or the higher feminine culture did Lord Rex care. In society he held it Woman’s duty to supply him, Rex Basire, with straw for his conversational brick-making; hooks and eyes, don’t you know! gleanings from the comic papers, hints at politics, easy openings for unsentimental sentiment. A distinctly stupid woman frightened him. ‘Makes one feel like being on one’s legs for a speech,’ Lord Rex Basire would say.