Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/120

THE BETTER SORT what he wants her to do. It's wonderful—and, in a manner, I think, quite splendid—the way he has made it easy for her. He has met her wishes handsomely—obliged her in every particular."

As she preferred, subtly enough, to put it all as if it were for the sole benefit of his wife, I was quite ready for this tone; but I privately defied her to keep it up. "Well, then, he hasn't laboured in vain."

"Oh, it couldn't have been in vain. What has happened has been the sort of thing that she couldn't possibly fail to act upon."

"Too great a scandal, eh?"

She but just paused at it. "Nothing neglected, certainly, or omitted. He was not the man to undertake it"

"And not put it through? No, I should say he wasn't the man. In any case he apparently hasn't been. But he must have found the job"

"Rather a bore?" she asked as I had hesitated.

"Well, not so much a bore as a delicate matter."

She seemed to demur. "Delicate?"

"Why, your sex likes him so."

"But isn't just that what has made it easy?"

"Easy for him—yes," I after a moment admitted.

But it wasn't what she meant. "And not difficult, also, for them."

This was the nearest approach I was to have heard her make, since the day of the meeting of the two women at my studio, to naming Mrs. Dundene. She never, to the end of the affair, came any closer to her in speech than by the collective and promiscuous plural pronoun. There might have been a dozen of them, and she took cognizance, in respect to them, only of quantity. It was as if it had been a way of showing how little of anything else she imputed. Quality, as distinguished from quantity, was what she had. "Oh, I think," I said, "that we can scarcely speak for them." 108