The dinner was probably the most painful experience in their lives.
Barbara had come to it softened and ready to meet him half way. The
right kind of humility in Monty would have found her plastic. But she
had very definite and rigid ideas of his duty in the premises. And
Monty was too simple minded to seem to suffer, and much too flippant to
understand. It was plain to each that the other did not expect to talk,
but they both realized that they owed a duty to appearances and to
their hostess. Through two courses, at least, there was dead silence
between them. It seemed as though every eye in the room were on them
and every mind were speculating. At last, in sheer desperation, Barbara
turned to him with the first smile he had seen on her face in days.
There was no smile in her eyes, however, and Monty understood.