Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/411

THE PAPERS chance thus failing him, or the train, the boat, the advantage, that the true journalist wouldn't have missed. He quite, under her eyes, while they stood together, ceased to be the true journalist; she saw him, as she felt, put off the character as definitely as she might have seen him remove his coat, his hat, or the contents of his pockets, in order to lay them on the parapet before jumping into the river. Wonderful was the difference that this transformation, marked by no word and supported by no sign, made in the man she had hitherto known. Nothing, again, could have so expressed for her his continued inward dismay. It was as if, for that matter, she couldn't have asked him a question without adding to it; and she didn't wish to add to it, since she was by this time more fully aware that she wished to be generous. When she at last uttered other words it was precisely so that she mightn't press him.

"I think of her—poor thing: that's what it makes me do. I think of her there at this moment—just out of the 'Line'—with this stuff shrieked at her windows." With which, having so at once contained and relieved herself, she caused him to walk on.

"Are you talking of Mrs. Chorner?" he after a moment asked. And then, when he had had her quick "Of course—of who else?" he said what she didn't expect. "Naturally one thinks of her. But she has herself to blame. I mean she drove him" What he meant, however, Bight suddenly dropped, taken as he was with another idea, which had brought them the next minute to a halt. "Mightn't you, by the way, see her?"

"See her now?"

"'Now' or never—for the good of it. Now's just your time."

"But how can it be hers, in the very midst?"

"Because it's in the very midst. She'll tell you 399