Husband and wife indeed thought her very odd; the wife was puzzled and uneasy. All through dinner Miss Protheroe had been very silent, from her place at the head of the table where she sat surveying her guests, only occasionally she had given vent to some such outburst, which she had at once restrained; and the dining-room had been odd too, a room at the back of the shop, full of queer theatrical things, and a great figure of a Javanese warrior in one corner, seven feet high, with a bearded yellow mask under his helmet, and a lantern swinging from the top of the spear he held in his hand. Bertie’s wife thought this a novel and unpleasing method of lighting a room. She had begun to wish they had never come. For the rest, there had been a barbaric flavour about the meal, unsuitable to one so obviously an English spinster; they had eaten off the sham gold plate, and had drunk out of the sham gold goblets; the sham gold candelabra had flared in the middle of the table with its eight or ten candles, above a great golden bowl of artificial fruit. It was difficult to believe that that setting was the invention of Lydia, sitting there so prim in the unchanged gown of bombazine. It was as disconcerting an indication as if Lydia had gotten up and danced. Out in the dim passage Lydia paused before Emily’s door. If she despised Bertie, she fairly hated Emily. Not one of Emily’s childish sneakings and whinings was forgotten; and Emily was unchanged: she had been dragged here, reluctant, by Bertie, tempted by the pictures Bertie drew of Lydia’s wealth; unable to resist that, she had come, but she was bitter and ungracious, wringing out that thin, sour little smile whenever Lydia looked at her. That supposed wealth, now become one of Lydia’s dearest jokes! They wouldn’t find much—the vultures—they would find that Lydia hadn’t hoarded, hadn’t kept back more than the little necessary to her own livelihood, so long as charity had stretched out to her its piteous hands. It was not part of Lydia’s creed to feast while others went hungry. Not for that had she broken away from her traditions and her family. She would have liked now to sham dead just for the sake of seeing their faces and hearing their comments. She wasted no time on Emily; she needed no sight of Emily’s face in order to whet her vindictiveness. She knew well enough what was going on behind all those closed doors. Whispers of cupidity, to the ugly accompaniment of the calculation of Lydia’s prosperity, oh, she knew, she knew! Mean souls! mean, prudent souls! They had thrown her out when she was poor; they fawned on her now that they thought her rich. Well, she would teach them a lesson; she would give them twenty-four hours’ entertainment which they would not be likely to forget.