Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/152

THE BETTER SORT "Then I don't see why it hasn't done you more good."

"Why, Mamie," he patiently reasoned, "what more good could it? As I tell you," he explained, "it has just been my life."

"Then why do you come to me for money?"

"Oh, they don't give me that!" Scott returned.

"So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must keep you up?"

He fixed on her the nice eyes that Lady Wantridge admired. "Do you mean to tell me that already—at this very moment—I am not distinctly keeping you?"

She gave him back his look. "Wait till she has asked you, and then," Mamie added, "decline."

Scott, not too grossly, wondered. "As acting for you?"

Mamie's next injunction was answer enough. "But before—yes—call."

He took it in. "Call—but decline. Good."

"The rest," she said, "I leave to you." And she left it, in fact, with such confidence that for a couple of days she was not only conscious of no need to give Mrs. Medwin another turn of the screw, but positively evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance of that lady. It was not till the third day that she waited upon her, finding her, as she had expected, tense.

"Lady Wantridge will?"

"Yes, though she says she won't."

"She says she won't? O—oh!" Mrs. Medwin moaned.

"Sit tight all the same. I have her!"

"But how?"

"Through Scott—whom she wants."

"Your bad brother!" Mrs. Medwin stared. "What does she want of him?"

"To amuse them at Catchmore. Anything for that. And he would. But he sha'n't!" Mamie declared. 140