But now, as I saw when I went to Regent's Park that night, it was as Iris had said, the years had made a great difference in their relation to each other. But in spite of the pleasing air of easy friendship about them--with a touch less reticent than usual about Roger and one more "lowered" about Antony--I managed to develop, as dinner went on, another very real grievance; so real indeed that, with some nursing, it lasted from that time on. It came about by my suddenly realizing that I had very little indeed to say to these brothers--an uncomfortable enough feeling about people whom one has known long enough never to worry about having much or little to say to them. But my surprise at being made aware of that constraint was heightened by another: that I had nothing to say to Roger and Antony simply because, for all their geniality, they had nothing to say to me! that they were, in fact, rather resenting my being there at all.... I candidly vented my grievance on Iris, who seemed somehow implicated, the next time I saw her, but she said that I was always apt to be psychic about the wrong things. "And even if you were in the least bit right you might be a little understanding about it," she complained. "For after all, it's not very unnatural that they should be a bit put out by you--because you, see, you've known all about their little bitternesses for so many years. You are somehow the sleuth that has never been shaken off! not, of course, that you ever wanted to be a sleuth, that was just circumstance, nor that either of them has ever wanted to shake you off--very much the reverse with Antony, in fact, poor Ronnie! But if there's any strain at all it must come from that, don't you think?..." I didn't. In fact I thought it a very poor explanation--and, anyway, I had lately been growing so impatient about the damnable vagaries of those brothers, especially Antony's, that I clutched at this as a last straw; and vowed that several moons must pass before I would again dine with Roger and Antony. And several moons did pass.... Since Antony's return I had discovered in myself a lack of sympathy with him that I had never before felt to such a degree, even on his most unsympathetic days. And now, as the weeks passed and he never so much as came near me, I thought of him as really beyond the limit. After all, I had done a good deal for the man, one way and another. And now, simply because he had no use for me.... There was a shamelessness about the thing that gave me a positive distaste for him, and I really desired to see him as little as possible. But it would have surprised me very much if I had known that, as a fact, I was to see him only once more, on that night a few months later.