Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on casters pulled forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's limber attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously hostile. She looked as if she would turn Marie Louise to stone with a Medusa glare, but she evidently felt that she had no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs. Prothero's home; so she bowed and murmured: "Ah, yis! How are you?" To Davidge's amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting the rebuff in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully. Then, to Davidge's confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt marched on him with a gush of cordiality as if she had been looking for him around the Seven Seas. She remembered him, called him by name and told him that she had seen his pickchah in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new fleet. Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but she had passed through so many women's wars that she had learned to ignore them even when--especially when--her drawing-room was the battleground. Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization of the butler. Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward the dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was floating along the current at the elbow of the pretty young girl, said to Davidge: "Are you taking me out or--" It was a horrible moment, for all its unimportance, but he mumbled: "I--I am sorry, but--er--Miss Webling--" "Oh! Ah!" said Lady Clifton-Wyatt. It was a very short "Oh!" and a very long "Ah!" a sort of gliding, crushing "Ah!" It went over him like a tank, leaving him flat. Lady Clifton-Wyatt reached Sir Hector's arm in a few strides and unhooked him from the girl--also the girl from him. The girl was grateful. Sir Hector was used to disappointments. Davidge went to Marie Louise, who stood lonely and distraught. He felt ashamed of his word "sorry" and hoped she hadn't heard it. Silently and crudely he angled his arm, and she took it and went along with him in a somnambulism. Davidge, manlike, tried to cheer up his elbow-mate by a compliment. A man's first aid to a woman in distress is a compliment or a few pats of the hand. He said: "This is the second big dinner you and I have attended. There were bushels of flowers between us before, but I'd rather see your face than a ton of roses." The compliment fell out like a ton of coal. He did not like it at all. She seemed not to have heard him, for she murmured: "Yis, isn't it?" Then, as the occultists say, he went into the silence. There is nothing busier than a silence at a dinner. The effort to think with no outlet in speech kept up such a roaring in his head that he could hardly grasp what the rest were saying. Lady Clifton-Wyatt sat at Davidge's right and kept invading his quiet communion with Marie Louise by making remarks of the utmost graciousness somehow fermented--like wine turned vinegar.