r support.

After dinner the guests retired immediately to their rooms, and Imogen
went upstairs on tiptoe, feeling the echo of breakage and the dust of
crumbling in the air. She wondered whether Flavia's habitual note of
uneasiness were not, in a manner, prophetic, and a sort of unconscious
premonition, after all. She sat down to write a letter, but she found
herself so nervous, her head so hot and her hands so cold, that she
soon abandoned the effort, just as she was about to seek Miss Broadwood,
Flavia entered and embraced her hysterically.

"My dearest girl," she began, "was there ever such an unfortunate and
incomprehensible speech made before? Of course it is scarcely necessary
to explain to you poor Arthur's lack of tact, and that he meant nothing.
But they! Can they be expected to understand? He will feel wretchedly
about it when he realizes what he has done, but in the meantime? And M.
Roux, of all men! When we were so fortunate as to get him, and he made
himself so unreservedly agreeable, and I fancied that, in his way,
Arthur quite admired him. My dear, you have no idea what that speech has
done. Schemetzkin and Herr Schotte have already sent me word that they
must leave us tomorrow. Such a thing from a host!" Flavia paused, choked
by tears of vexation and despair.

Imogen was thoroughly disconcerted; this was the first time she had ever
seen Flavia betray any personal emotion which was indubitably genuine.
She replied with what consolation she could. "Need they take it
personally at all? It was a mere observation upon a class of people--"

"Which he knows nothing whatever about, and with whom he has no
sympathy," interrupted Flavia. "Ah, my dear, you could not be _expected_
to understand. You can't realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire
lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely _nil_, stone deaf
and stark blind, on that side. He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is
just the brutality of utter ignorance. They always feel it--they are so
sensitive to unsympathetic influences, you know; they know it the moment
they come into the house. I have spent my life apologizing for him and
struggling to conceal it; but in spite of me, he wounds them; his very
attitude, even in silence, offends them. Heavens! Do I not know? Is
it not perpetually and forever wounding me? But there has never been
anything so dreadful as this--never! If I could conceive of any possible
motive, even!"

"But, surely, Mrs.