He enjoyed baiting her, yet he thought, carelessly, that it was a pity she should have inaugurated guerilla warfare. She looked as if she could have been pleasant company for his spare time if she had chosen. However, he would have little enough spare time, for the next few weeks, anyhow ... he had promised Jean to set to work seriously at the renovation of her garden.... He should be thankful for a visitor requiring neither escort nor attention. Yet, naturally, her independence piqued him. He eyed her swiftly, as she sat at his right hand. She was a curious girl, he thought, to be so pretty and well-dressed, and yet so self-sufficing. Girls, apparently of her type, (he thought of his American cousins) usually needed a good deal of admiration to keep them contented. She did not look altogether contented, though ... there were lines and puckers at the corners of her large eyes, that were surely out of place ... nineteen, wasn't she? She had had a breakdown, of course ... rather absurd, for such a child.... Jean had hinted a guess at some trouble.... A love affair, he supposed. That would account for her thorniness, her occasional air of absence and depression, that contrasted with her usual cheerfulness.... Yet that curious whim the other day--what had it meant? More than a whim, he imagined--her very lips had grown white.... He was quite sure that he had helped her out of a hole.... She might at least show a certain decent gratitude.... He wondered what she was thinking about, sitting there so silently ... she was generally talkative enough ... pretty quarrelsome, too. He supposed she was having a fit of the blues.... He had better talk to her, perhaps.... Alwynne, eating her wing of chicken, was merely and sheerly shy. She was garrulous enough with women, but she did not in the least know how to talk to men. Therefore and naturally she was full of theories. She had vague ideas that they had to be amused as babies have to be amused, but confronted with the prospect of a prolonged _tête-à-tête_, without Alicia or Jean to retire upon, she had nothing whatever to say. Yet she had been taught by Elsbeth to consider a lack of table-talk as a lack of manners, and was irritated with herself for her silence, and still more irritated with Roger for his. She met his belated attempts at a conversation none too graciously--was bored by the boat-race, and would have nothing to say to the weather; though she thawed to his catalogue of copses and plantations in the neighbourhood, where certain wild flowers she had not yet discovered might be found.