Page:Tales of John Oliver Hobbes.djvu/51

Rh of a Romeo who, though no longer a youth and certainly not possessed of the romantic air, had at all events a well-built figure, considerable fire in his eyes, and was the "makings of a success." Juliet was a rôle she could rarely indulge in, nor indeed was it a rôle she particularly cared for. It was so hard to find a Romeo worth playing to! With a woman's quickness she saw that Provence was a man of unusual refinement and delicate feeling—he would never take too much for granted. She promised herself some excitement in finding the limit to his self-restraint.

Edward Cargill, meantime, began to feel hardly used. He, after all, had led Cynthia in to dinner, and she had not addressed him directly once, except to ask his opinion of that year's growth of asparagus. Agatha had, no doubt, done her best to atone for her sister's want of manners, and had expressed her views with much propriety and no little erudition on the recent excavations in Asia Minor, to which Edward had replied that excavating and exploring were awfully jolly for those who liked them, but he didn't like them. Here Sir James came puffing to the rescue by inquiring—certainly with some want of relevance—whether any more boys in the church choir were down with the influenza. Nor did he stop there—for the choir reminded him of music, and music reminded him of an article he had read that morning on the increased importation of cat-gut. Cat-gut very naturally suggested cats, and cats brought the Egyptians—whom he had quite forgotten—to his mind. And Lady Theodosia had carefully mentioned in her note that the new man was an Egyptologist. Egypt