Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/370

THE BETTER SORT as pleased as Punch. Or, rather, you're not quite entirely so, because you can't goad me to fury. You can't worry me as much as you'd like. Marry me first, old man, and then see if I mind. Why shouldn't you keep it up?—I mean lunching with him?" His questions came as in play that was a little pointless, without his waiting more than a moment for answers; though it was not indeed that she might not have answered even in the moment, had not the pointless play been more what she wanted. "Was it at the place," he went on, "that he took us to?"

"Dear no—at his flat, where I've been before. You'll see, in Brains, on Wednesday. I don't think I've muffed it—it's really rather there. But he showed me everything this time—the bathroom, the refrigerator, and the machines for stretching his trousers. He has nine, and in constant use."

"Nine?" said Bight gravely.

"Nine."

"Nine trousers?"

"Nine machines. I don't know how many trousers."

"Ah, my dear," he said, "that's a grave omission; the want of the information will be felt and resented. But does it all, at any rate," he asked, "sufficiently fetch you?" After which, as she didn't speak, he lapsed into helpless sincerity. "Is it really, you think, his dream to secure you?"

She replied, on this, as if his tone made it too amusing. "Quite. There's no mistaking it. He sees me as, most days in the year, pulling the wires and beating the drum somewhere; that is he sees me of course not exactly as writing about 'our home'—once I've got one myself, but as procuring others to do it through my being (as you've made him believe) in with the Organs of Public Opinion. He doesn't see, if I'm half decent, why there shouldn't be something about him 358