"Not all of it," she answered quietly. She turned the shade of the lamp so that its rays focussed themselves on a writing-desk in an alcove. "The typewriter and the telephone are signs that I am not at all an old-fashioned person." "I didn't say that, did I?" he replied, smiling. She laughed. "Please sit down and be comfortable. It's nice to have such an unexpected call. And I'm glad that though I'm banned from Lavery's you don't consider yourself banned from here." "Ah," he said. He was surprised that she had broached the question so directly. He flushed slightly and went on, after a pause: "I think perhaps the ban had better be withdrawn altogether." "Why?" "Oh, well--well, it doesn't matter--I didn't come here to talk about it." "Oh, yes, you did. That's just what you did come here to talk about. Either that or something more serious. You don't mean to tell me that you pay an unconventional call like this just to tell me what an enjoyable holiday you've had." "I didn't have an enjoyable holiday at all," he answered. "There! I guessed as much! After all, you wouldn't have come home so soon if you'd been having a thoroughly good time, would you?" "Helen wanted to come home." She ceased her raillery of him and went suddenly serious. For some time she stared into the fire without speaking, and then, in a different tone of voice altogether she said: "Why did she want to come home?" He began to talk rather fast and staccato. "I--I don't know whether I ought to tell you this--except that you were Helen's friend and can perhaps help me.... You see, Helen was very nervous the whole time, and there were one or two dinner-parties, and she--well, not exactly put her foot in it, you know, but was--well, rather obviously out of everything. I don't know how it is--she seems quite unable to converse in the ordinary way that people do--I don't mean anything brilliant--few people converse brilliantly--what I mean is that--well, she--" She interrupted: "You mean that when her neighbour says, 'Have you heard Caruso in Carmen?'--she hasn't got the sense to reply: 'Oh, yes, isn't he simply gorgeous?'" "That's a rather satirical way of putting it." "Well, anyway, it seems a small reason for coming home. If I were constitutionally incapable of sustaining dinner-party small-talk and my husband brought me away from his parents for that reason, I'd leave him for good." "I didn't bring her away. She begged me to let her go." "Then you must have been cruel to her. You must have made her think that it mattered." "Well, doesn't it matter?"