Page:Encounters (Bowen).djvu/193

 "Don't they make one feel holy," he said.

Laura, who had blushed for Archie during the parts of Mrs. McKenna's conversation—one never knew what that little woman was going to say, her mind flickered about like a lizard—thought that it might now be possible to turn the current. "I like them," she asserted.

"I hate them! I hate them!" cried Mrs. McKenna, putting her hands up over her ears and stamping her foot.

"They've been ringing for the last half-hour and you didn't seem to mind," said Gilda Roche, bending down to knock the ash off her cigarette into Laura's tea-cup.

"Yes, but they come in at the pauses so reprovingly; like Wilson putting his owl's face round the door. He longs to clear away the tea-things, but you give him no encouragement, and he is afraid of tumbling over Archie's feet. He's been in three times."

"I know," said Gilda penitently. "But if he takes away the tea-things it will leave us all sitting round in an empty circle, with no particular raison d' ȇtre."