It rendered her own enthusiastic appetite all the more conspicuous.
For two reasons Hosack was far from happy.

One was because Mrs.Barnet Thatcher was seated on his right pelting him with brightness and the other because Joan, on his left, looked clean through his head whenever he tried to engage her in sentimental sotto voce.
Gaiety was left to Prim and the wounded Englishman and to young Oldershaw and the towering Regina who continually threw back her head to emit howls of laughter at Barclay's drolleries while she displayed the large red cavern of her mouth and all her wonderful teeth.

After every one of these exhausting paroxysms she said, with her characteristic exuberance of sociability, "Isn't he the best thing ?" "Don't you think he's the most fascinating creature ?" to any one whose eye she caught,--a nice, big, beautiful, insincere girl who had been taught at her fashionable school that in order to succeed in Society and help things along she must rave about everything in extravagant language and make as much noise as her lungs would permit.
Joan's unusual lack of spirits was noticed by every one and especially, with grim satisfaction, by Gilbert Palgrave.

With a return of optimism he told himself that his rudeness expressed so pungently had had its effect.

He congratulated himself upon having, at last, been able to show Joan the sort of foolish figure that she cut in his sight and even went so far as to persuade himself that, after all, she must do something more than like him to be so silent and depressed.
His deductions were, however, as hopelessly wrong as usual.