Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/349

THE PAPERS "I want, while I'm about it, to pity him in sufficient quantity."

"Precisely. Which means, for a woman, with extravagance and to the point of immorality."

"I ain't a woman," Maud Blandy sighed. "I wish I were!"

"Well, about the pity," he went on; "you shall be immoral, I promise you, before you've done. Doesn't Mortimer Marshal," he asked, "take you for a woman?"

"You'll have to ask him. How," she demanded, "does one know those things?" And she stuck to her Beadel-Muffet. "If you're to see him on Monday sha'n't you then get to the bottom of it?"

"Oh, I don't conceal from you that I promise myself larks, but I won't tell you, positively I won't," Bight said, "what I see. You're morbid. If it's only bad enough—I mean his motive—you'll want to save him."

"Well, isn't that what you're to profess to him that you want?"

"Ah," the young man returned. "I believe you'd really invent a way."

"I would if I could." And with that she dropped it. "There's my fat friend," she presently added, as the entr'acte still hung heavy and Mortimer Marshal, from a row much in advance of them, screwed himself round in his tight place apparently to keep her in his eye.

"He does then," said her companion, "take you for a woman. I seem to guess he's 'litteryliterary [sic].'"

"That's it; so badly that he wrote that 'littery' plyplay [sic] Corisanda, you must remember, with Beatrice Beaumont in the principal part, which was given at three matinees in this very place and which hadn't even the luck of being slated. Every creature connected with the production, from the man himself and Beatrice herself down to the mothers and grandmothers of the 337