Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off “somewhere or another” and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always “scatter braining about” either at the yacht club or somewhere else.

106

Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt.

Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite?

She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the household ménage at Kilgobbin, 107 no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings.

107

She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man’s eyes.

When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is death.

Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven o’clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.

Her cheeks flushed and her eyes 

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