could always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying
"It's mutton."

And, of course, Arlington Stringham continued to tread the thorny
path of conscious humour into which Fate had beckoned him.

"The country's looking very green, but, after all, that's what
it's there for," he remarked to his wife two days later.

"That's very modern, and I dare say very clever, but I'm afraid
it's wasted on me," she observed coldly. If she had known how
much effort it had cost him to make the remark she might have
greeted it in a kinder spirit. It is the tragedy of human
endeavour that it works so often unseen and unguessed.

Arlington said nothing, not from injured pride, but because he was
thinking hard for something to say. Eleanor mistook his silence
for an assumption of tolerant superiority, and her anger prompted
her to a further gibe.

"You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I've no doubt she would
appreciate it."

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a
time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had
once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical
Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit.
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's
poems, but her family denied both stories.