Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/53

Rh the plan of treating it with a smile. She wished to be liberal. 'Well, of course, they do lay it out'

'They bore me to death,' her companion pursued with slightly more temperance.

But this was going too far. 'Ah, that's because you've no sympathy!'

The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that she wouldn't have any either if she had to count all day all the words in the dictionary; a contention Mrs. Jordan quite granted, the more that she shuddered at the notion of ever failing of the very gift to which she owed the vogue—the rage she might call it—that had caught her up. Without sympathy or without imagination, for it came back again to that—how should she get, for big dinners, down the middle and toward the far corners at all? It wasn't the combinations, which were easily managed: the strain was over the ineffable simplicities, those that the bachelors above all, and Lord Rye perhaps most of any, threw off—just blew off, like cigarette-puffs—such sketches of. The betrothed of Mr. Mudge at all events accepted