Fliss caught her glance. “Mustn’t, Dick,” she said, laughingly. “Your wife’s looking at me. She has her till-death-do-us-part look on.” Her voice carried and they turned to look at Cecily--all the people at the end of the table--merrily, jocularly. Cecily tried to smile, tortured by the glances that seemed to be penetrating her thoughts. Dick looked a little annoyed. “Don’t be worried, Cecily.” Fliss wouldn’t leave her alone. “I wasn’t worried.” Now they were laughing. That wasn’t what she should have said. She should have been light, gay, debonair, flippant. Why? Because that was what they expected. Like a match to a gathered pile of brush were the comments to Cecily’s resentment. She was suddenly angry as she had never been angry before in her life--cruelly angry. She wanted to hurt them all--Fliss, Della most. But her opportunity did not come till later. Howard found her better company. She talked to him now, seeming to insist on talking. He told her about how he thought game should be cooked, about the new club rules for membership, about the things he was interested in. She answered him, played up to him, her mind alert, her eyes casually now on that other end of the table. “We’ll get up a party and go,” she heard Dick say. They were drinking coffee. Fliss was devoting herself more to Gordon. There was a smoldering look in Gordon’s eyes that Cecily read and that it shamed her to read. He looked as if the presence of people, of Matthew himself, hardly interested him. He wanted to slip his arm down close around her, bend his head lower. Dick was competing for her favor, actually competing. “We’ll get up a party,” he repeated. “There’s a tiled floor and the funniest nigger band you ever heard. You’ll love it, Fliss.” “All right,” said Fliss. “Will you come along, Cecily?” That was to demonstrate her power, thought Cecily. Fliss was asking her to a party with her own husband. “If I can,” she answered coldly. “If I get a cook and can manage to get out.” A little smile of pitying superiority to one so tied down by domestic affairs showed on Fliss’s face. “Miserable luck, Cecily.” Then to Dick, “Do you starve without a cook, poor Dick?” Like a flash Cecily struck back. Cool and icy and penetrating her voice carried down the table length. “I think I’ll have my old cook back shortly. She is nursing your mother now, you know, Fliss.” And to her neighbor quite clearly, “She had to go to Mrs. Horton, of course, because she is her cousin.” There was the faintest little smile, the smallest hush. Mrs. Longstreet’s eyebrows went up and then down,--her only signal of lack of equilibrium. Then she rose and the company followed. Only in that instant Cecily had seen Dick’s angry glance and the cruel flush that had risen on the face of Fliss. It delighted her to see that the blow had gone home. Then an acute sense of degradation swallowed up her delight.