Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/368

THE BETTER SORT no joke, the subject, clearly, and her friend had fairly gained age, as he had certainly lost weight, in his recent dealings with it. It struck her even, with everything else, that this was positively the way she would have liked him to show if their union had taken the form they hadn't reached the point of discussing; wearily coming back to her from the thick of things, wanting to put on his slippers and have his tea, all prepared by her and in their place, and beautifully to be trusted to regale her in his turn. He was excited, disavowedly, and it took more disavowal still after she had opened her budget—which she did, in truth, by saying to him as her first alternative: "What did you do him for, poor Mortimer Marshal? It isn't that he's not in the seventh heaven!"

"He is in the seventh heaven!" Bight quickly broke in. "He doesn't want my blood?"

"Did you do him," she asked, "that he should want it? It's splendid how you could—simply on that show."

"That show? Why," said Howard Bight, "that show was an immensity. That show was volumes, stacks, abysses."

He said it in such a tone that she was a little at a loss. "Oh, you don't want abysses."

"Not much, to knock off such twaddle. There isn't a breath in it of what I saw. What I saw is my own affair. I've got the abysses for myself. They're in my head—it's always something. But the monster," he demanded, "has written you?"

"How couldn't he—that night? I got it the next morning, telling me how much he wanted to thank me and asking me where he might see me. So I went," said Maud, "to see him."

"At his own place again?"

"At his own place again. What do I yearn for but to be received at people's own places?" 356