Roger enjoyed the shooting with rifle and shot-gun, and his dislike of Willowby was a little tempered by the latter’s unwilling admiration of his marksmanship. I forget whether in August-September you fish for salmon in Scotland with a rod and line, but if so you may be sure Captain Brentham, to whom field sports of all kinds came as second nature, displayed no less prowess in that direction. Moreover Willowby tried to be civil to his deputy host because he was very much drawn to big-game shooting in East Africa and thought Roger could put him up to the right place, right time of year, and right strings to pull. But when the day’s sport was done and they had bathed and changed and laid themselves out for a jolly evening, Roger began to be nervous and sensitive about Lucy: sometimes to wish she would not open her mouth; at others to yearn for her to show some brilliance in conversation. Her little naïvetés of speech and turns of phrase which seemed so amusing and even endearing in Africa, or to an admiring, bucolic audience at Aldermaston, or an indulgent sister-in-law at Farleigh Vicarage, here withered into imbecilities under the mocking glance or the bored incomprehension of Sibyl, and the cool, eyeglass stare of Willowby Patterne. Sibyl, also, was afflicted with deafness when Lucy ventured her inquiries at breakfast as to health or the state of the weather. Out of fear of Queen Victoria, Sibyl thought to make friends at Court and attest at the same time the "smallness" and "quietness" of her house party by inviting for a week a lady of the Royal Household who was off duty and at all times not unwilling to eat well and sleep softly at some one else’s expense. But she, also, was disconcerting (though no doubt a pyramid of flawless chastity). She wore a single eyeglass through which everything and everybody was scanned. At first she was disposed to be very much interested in Roger, until she gathered he might not be returning to Africa. She had friends who were casting in their lots with Cecil Rhodes’s ventures. To her mental vision, Africa was about the size of an English county. A man in East Africa ought at any moment to run up against that perfectly delightful creature, Rhodes, ... "the dear Queen is getting _so_ interested in him" ... "was there gold by the bye where Captain Brentham had been employed?" But when she learnt that Sibyl’s cousin was probably not resuming his post there and that this very dull, oddly dressed woman was not Sibyl’s secretary but Roger’s wife, a former missionary in East Africa, she quietly gave them both up as much too much outside her own track through life ever to be of use or interest again.