Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/391

THE PAPERS "I mean," she said with a shade of uncertainty, "about poor dear Beadel."

"So do I. So does everyone. No one now, at any moment, means anything about anyone else. But I've lost intellectual control—of the extraordinary case. I flattered myself I still had a certain amount. But the situation at last escapes me. I break down. Non comprenny? I give it up."

She continued to look at him hard. "Then what's the matter with you?"

"Why, just that, probably—that I feel like a clever man 'done,' and that your tone with me adds to the feeling. Or, putting it otherwise, it's perhaps only just one of the ways in which I'm so interesting; that, with the life we lead and the age we live in, there's always something the matter with me—there can't help being: some rage, some disgust, some fresh amazement against which one hasn't, for all one's experience, been proof. That sense—of having been sold again—produces emotions that may well, on occasion, be reflected in the countenance. There you are."

Well, he might say that, "There you are," as often as he liked without, at the pass they had come to, making her in the least see where she was. She was only just where she stood, a little apart in the lobby, listening to his words, which she found eminently characteristic of him, struck with an odd impression of his talking against time, and, most of all, tormented to recognise that she could fairly do nothing better, at such a moment, than feel he was awfully nice. The moment—that of his most blandly (she would have said in the case of another most impudently) failing, all round, to satisfy her—was appropriate only to some emotion consonant with her dignity. It was all crowded and covered, hustled and interrupted now; but what really happened in this brief passage, and with her finding no words to reply to him, was that dignity quite appeared 379