"As she's my mare, perhaps I might have the privilege," said Dick.
Austin cried out, in all good faith: "My dear old boy, is there anything
especially mine or yours in this house?"
Katherine, a keen observer, broke quickly into the talk.
"There's Dick's armoury. That's his own particular and private domain.
You're going to explain it all to me this afternoon, aren't you? You
promised yesterday."
She drew Dick into talk away from the others. The lecture on the armoury
was fixed for three o'clock, when she would be free from the duty from
which, during her stay at the Manor House, she had freed Viviette, of
postprandial reading of the newspaper to Mrs. Ware. But her interest in
his hobby for once failed to awaken his enthusiasm. The dull jealousy of
Austin, against which his honest soul had struggled successfully all his
life long, had passed beyond his control. These few days of Austin's
Whitsun visit had changed his cosmic view. Petty rebuffs, such as the
matters of the stables and the Rural District Council, which formerly he
would have regarded in the twilight of his mind as part of the
unchangeable order of things in which Austin was destined to shine
resplendently and he to glimmer--Austin the arc-lamp and he the
tallow-dip--became magnified into grievances and insults intolerable.
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