The Crevequers supposed that this might be so. Young Miranda Venables said that she thought the past was an awful bore. She did not approve of Naples; she was vexed at missing the hockey and beagling season at home, and she thought towns were beastly, especially Italian towns. She hated them. She looked towards the Crevequers with a rising of hope; here, it seemed, were two people who lacked intelligent interest even as she did. Miranda was, from her mother's point of view, a failure. She was in no way æsthetic, except sartorially. The Liberty frocks and flopping hats that her soul loathed seemed to give an edged incongruity to her pleasant round face, with its rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. She did not rebel against the bitter yoke of the picturesque: it was not worth while; she was merely used to remark, with her customary forcible elegance of phrase, that if her mother chose to spend money on making her look a guy, it was her look out, though Miranda considered it a pity that she could not get better value than that for her outlay. But her soul was not at all in her clothes; it was in quite different things--chiefly in hockey. She raised that theme. 'I say, couldn't we get up a sort of a club? There must be a ground somewhere.' But the Crevequers, it seemed, did not play hockey. It was sad how everywhere gulfs yawned. Miranda sighed, and fell back upon her lunch. That remains, even in Naples. The Crevequers, on their side of the gulf, talked; they were really quite entertaining; their acquaintance included such various types of persons, their experience such interesting incidents. Some of the incidents revealed them, personally, in a light rather unusual--a light not apt, as a rule, to illumine a lunch-party. Of this they were sublimely unconscious; at their ignoring of it Warren Venables smiled a little. They were wholly innocent of the half-humorous, half-boastful posturing of the conscious rake; these things, assumed as the basis of their stories rather than narrated, were to them entirely natural--a matter of course. From the same outer darkness--Venables came to believe it was that--Tommy had discoursed of _Marchese Peppino_. It was not that they considered themselves reputable people, but simply that reputability (and the word includes in this case common honesty) was a thing wholly ignored by them, outside their sphere of knowledge. Certainly, such ignoring obviated embarrassment. Meanwhile, to entertain a tableful of strangers at lunch is an admirable gift. Mrs. Venables, possibly, did not sufficiently appreciate it; being amused came very much lower down on her scale of pleasures than being interested; it was perhaps fortunate, therefore, that it was a pleasure much rarer of attainment. She did not desire it of the Crevequers; she desired, as she phrased it, to draw them out, to achieve a near and serious intimacy.