Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/347

THE PAPERS "That's it—that is cynical. Enough's as good as a feast." But he came back to the ground they had quitted. "What were you going to say he's prominent for, Mortimer Marshal?"

She wouldn't, however, follow him there yet, her curiosity on the other issue not being spent. "Do you know then as a fact, that he's marrying again, the bereaved gentleman?"

Her friend, at this, showed impatience. "My dear fellow, do you see nothing? We had it all, didn't we, three months ago, and then we didn't have it, and then we had it again; and goodness knows where we are. But I throw out the possibility. I forget her bloated name, but she may be rich, and she may be decent. She may make it a condition that he keeps out—out, I mean, of the only things he has really ever been 'in.'"

"The Papers?"

"The dreadful, nasty, vulgar Papers. She may put it to him—I see it dimly and queerly, but I see it—that he must get out first, and then they'll talk; then she'll say yes, then he'll have the money. I see it—and much more sharply—that he wants the money, needs it I mean, badly, desperately, so that this necessity may very well make the hole in which he finds himself. Therefore he must do something—what he's trying to do. It supplies the motive that our picture, the other day, rather missed."

Maud Blandy took this in, but it seemed to fail to satisfy her. "It must be something worse. You make it out that, so that your practical want of mercy, which you'll not be able to conceal from me, shall affect me as less inhuman."

"I don't make it out anything, and I don't care what it is; the queerness, the grand 'irony' of the case is itself enough for me. You, on your side, however, I think, make it out what you call 'something worse', because of the romantic bias of your mind. You 'see 335