His sister-in-law, bursting into tears, rushed from the room. James guffawed and helped himself to potatoes. The various mothers reproved their children for breaches of table manners. George looked nervously at his wife as if she was on the point of following the example of Beatrice. Grandmama, who was daily receding further and further into the past, put on her spectacles and told John, reproachfully, that he ought not to tease little Beatrice. Hugh engaged Miss Hamilton in a conversation about Bernard Shaw. John, forgetting he had already dipped twice in mustard the morsel of beef upon his fork, dipped it again, so that his eyes presently filled with tears, to which the observant Harold called everybody's attention. "Don't make personal remarks, darling," his mother whispered. "That's what Johnnie said to me this morning," James chuckled. When the dog-cart drove off with James and Beatrice at three o'clock to catch the 3:45 train up to town, John retired to his study in full expectation that when the mare came back she would at once turn round for the purpose of driving Miss Hamilton to catch the 5:30 train up to town: no young woman in her position would forgive that vulgar scene at lunch. But when he reached his desk he found his secretary hard at work upon the collection of material for the play as if nothing had happened. In the presence of such well-bred indifference the recollection of Beatrice's behavior abashed him more than ever, and, feeling that any kind of even indirect apology from him would be distasteful to Miss Hamilton, he tried to concentrate upon the grouping of the trial scene with an equal show of indifference to the mean events of family life. He was so far successful that the afternoon passed away without any allusion to Beatrice, and when the gong sounded for tea his equanimity was in order again. After tea, however, Eleanor managed to get hold of John for what she called a little chat about the future, but which he detected with the mind's nose as an unpleasant rehash of the morning's pasticcio. He always dreaded this sister-in-law when she opened with zoological endearments, and his spirits sank to hear her exclaim boisterously: "Now, look here, you poor wounded old lion, I'm going to talk to you seriously about Beatrice." "There's nothing more to be said," John assured her. "Now don't be an old bear. You've already made one poor aunt cry; don't upset me too." Anybody less likely to be prostrated by grief than Eleanor at that moment John could not have imagined. She seemed to him the incarnation of a sinister self-assurance. "Rubbish," he snapped. "In any case, yours would only be stage tears, you old crocodile--if I may copy your manner of speech."