Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/338

THE BETTER SORT Maud showed however at this point a reserve which appeared to have grown as the possibility opened out. "I believe in it—it must come. It can't not. It's the only end. He doesn't know; nobody knows—the simple-minded all: only you and I know. But it won't be nice, remember."

"It won't be funny?"

"It will be pitiful. There'll have to be a reason."

"For his turning round?" the young man nursed the vision. "More or less—I see what you mean. But except for a 'ply' will that so much matter? His reason will concern himself. What will concern us will be his funk and his helplessness, his having to stand there in the blaze, with nothing and nobody to put it out. We shall see him, shrieking for a bucket of water, wither up in the central flame."

Her look had turned sombre. "It makes one cruel. That is it makes you. I mean our trade does."

"I dare say—I see too much. But I'm willing to chuck it."

"Well," she presently replied, "I'm not willing to, but it seems pretty well on the cards that I shall have to. I don't see too much. I don't see enough. So, for all the good it does me!"

She had pushed back her chair and was looking round for her umbrella. "Why, what's the matter?" Howard Bight too blankly inquired.

She met his eyes while she pulled on her rusty old gloves. "Well, I'll tell you another time."

He kept his place, still lounging, contented where she had again become restless. "Don't you call it seeing enough to see—to have had so luridly revealed to you—the doom of Beadel-Muffet?"

"Oh, he's not my business, he's yours. You're his man, or one of his men—he'll come back to you. Besides, he's a special case, and, as I say, I'm too sorry for him." 326