Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/394

THE BETTER SORT just this dangerous candour, which encouraged the candour of the victim. She had for the latter a residuum of pity, whereas Bight, she felt, had none, and she didn't want him, the poor man, absolutely to pay with his life.

It was clear, however, within a few minutes, that this was what he was bent on doing, and she found herself helpless before his smug insistence. She had taken his measure; he was made incorrigibly to try, irredeemably to fail—to be, in short, eternally defeated and eternally unaware. He wouldn't rage—he couldn't, for the citadel might, in that case, have been carried by his assault; he would only spend his life in walking round and round it, asking everyone he met how in the name of goodness one did get in. And everyone would make a fool of him—though no one so much as her companion now—and everything would fall from him but the perfection of his temper, of his tailor, of his manners, of his mediocrity. He evidently rejoiced at the happy chance which had presented him again to Bight, and he lost as little time as possible in proposing, the play ended, an adjournment again to tea. The spirit of malice in her comrade, now inordinately excited, met this suggestion with an amendment that fairly made her anxious; Bight threw out, in a word, the idea that he himself surely, this time, should entertain Mr. Marshal.

"Only I'm afraid I can take you but to a small pot house that we poor journalists haunt."

"They're just the places I delight in—it would be of an extraordinary interest. I sometimes venture into them feeling awfully strange and wondering, I do assure you, who people are. But to go there with you!" And he looked from Bight to Maud and from Maud back again with such abysses of appreciation that she knew him as lost indeed. 382