"Surely you know your husband and his brother well enough to know that
neither of them will ever do what they don't want to do! Really, my
dear, it will be much better for every one, but mainly you, not to
interfere between them....
"It's a silly idea, anyway," I added, "because even if Roger consented,
which isn't probable, Antony would see him to blazes before he'd enter
his house. I've tried 'em both, you know."
It was a little perturbing to have Iris pat my shoulder on that
mockingly, and say: "There, there, everything will be all right--for
who but Antony himself suggested it to me at lunch time?"
And she went on, my mind puzzled with this hard fact--Antony had told
Iris that he wanted to make friends with Roger! Antony, the most
obstinate braggart in the world!
"I chanced the subject, of course," Iris was saying, "and Antony agreed
that it was the silliest thing in a silly life, and that he would like
to put it right.... Surely they can't still be going on about that
silly schoolboy quarrel you once told me about!"
"Oh, the quarrel! the quarrel was nothing, just a lid to the thing. The
trivialest thing for a blaze of temper that I ever saw. But they must
have hated each other for years."
She put her hands to her ears in mockery.
"Oh, dear! You're as bad and silly and sinister as they are! I'm
terribly disappointed in you as a man of wise counsel, Ronnie. Grown
up men don't go on hating each other for ever and ever, simply because
they are made different--"
"Or simply because they are made the same," I broke in.
"Oh, chicken-food!" Iris rudely said. "Anyway, I'm going to speak to
Roger about it...."
"Well," said I, "he won't speak to you about it. He will just be
silent, and let you go on speaking--and when you've finished you can
begin again." I got that gibe in just in time, as between the door-mat
and the door, so to speak....
And I judged that it must have been very much as I said, for when I saw
Iris again she was not even decently communicative about it, so that
I had impatiently to accuse her of being the kind of woman who would
liefer not mention her failures. But she said she hadn't failed, "and
anyway the word 'failure' seems rather portentous about so childish a
matter.
"He was like a blank wall," she explained. "Or rather not a blank one,
for he's never quite that. And, of course, his sort of silence made me
lose my head as usual, so that I might just as well have been prattling
about the cultivation of sweet potatoes as about poor Antony, for all
the good I did. And in the end he merely said he would see about it, or
words to that effect."
"Or no effect," I amended, finally.
But she did not tell me till much later that Roger had listened to her
speech about Antony, an extremely unusual subject between them, with
such a fine show of interest as he didn't generally lend to what she
said; so that she had thought the thing was going on splendidly until,
when she had finished, he had smiled, and murmured:--
"I wonder what other reason there could possibly be for Antony's
wanting to make it up except that we are both acquainted with my
wife...."