A little later, in a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous scarlet and yellow still-life of muffins and jam between them, Oliver felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected. Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him in the second had come to his help as he knew they would--she was too concerned now with trying to comfort him in small unobtrusive ways to be on her guard herself about her own troubles. All he had to do, he knew, was to sit there and look ostentatiously brokenhearted to have the conversation move in just the directions he wished and that, though it made him feel shameless was not exactly difficult--all he required was a single thought of the last three weeks to make his acting sour perfection itself. “Greater love hath no man than this,” he thought with a grotesque humor--he wondered if any of the celebrated story-book patterns of friendship from Damon and Jonathan on would have found things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly acquaintance to help their real friends. “I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter,” he began finally after regarding a buttered muffin for several minutes as if it were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. “Asking me out here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-butter letter of course--but I wanted to tell you really--” He stopped and let the sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor. And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at once. “Why Ollie, as if it was anything--when we've all of us more or less grown up together, haven't we--and you and Peter--” She stopped--oh what was the use of being tactful! “I suppose it sounds--put on--and--sentimental and all that--saying it,” she laughed nervously, “but we--all of us--Peter and myself--we're so really _sorry_--if you'll believe us--only it was hard to know if you wanted to have us say so--how awfully sorry we were. And then asking you out here with this howling mob doesn't seem much like it, does it? but Peter was going to be here--and Ted--and I knew what friends you'd been in college--I thought maybe--but I just didn't want you to think it was because we didn't care--” “I know--and--and--thanks--and I do appreciate, Elinor.” Oliver noticed with some slight terror that his own voice seemed to be getting a little out of control. But what she had just said took away his last doubt as to whether she was really the kind of person Ted ought to marry--and in spite of feeling as if he were trapping her into a surgical operation she knew nothing about, he kept on.