Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/334

THE BETTER SORT permitted, but also made for reciprocity and intimacy. These talks over greasy white slabs, repeatedly mopped with moist grey cloths by young women in black uniforms, with inexorable braided "buns" in the nape of weak necks, these sessions, sometimes prolonged, in halls of oilcloth, among penal-looking tariffs and pyramids of scones, enabled them to rest on their oars; the more that they were on terms with the whole families, chartered companies, of food-stations, each a race of innumerable and indistinguishable members, and had mastered those hours of comparative elegance, the earlier and the later, when the little weary ministrants were limply sitting down and the occupants of the red benches bleakly interspaced. So it was, that, at times, they renewed their understanding, and by signs, mannerless and meagre, that would have escaped the notice of witnesses. Maud Blandy had no need to kiss her hand across to him to show she felt what he meant; she had moreover never in her life kissed her hand to anyone, and her companion couldn't have imagined it of her. His romance was so grey that it wasn't romance at all; it was a reality arrived at without stages, shades, forms. If he had been ill or stricken she would have taken him—other resources failing—into her lap; but would that, which would scarce even have been motherly, have been romantic? She nevertheless at this moment put in her plea for the general element. "I can't help it, about Beadel-Muffet; it's too magnificent—it appeals to me. And then I've a particular feeling about him—I'm waiting to see what will happen. It is genius, you know, to get yourself so celebrated for nothing—to carry out your idea in the face of everything. I mean your idea of being celebrated. It isn't as if he had done even one little thing. What has he done when you come to look?"

"Why, my dear chap, he has done everything. He has missed nothing. He has been in everything, of 322