Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/432

THE BETTER SORT "If I have," said Maud, "it's because you have. Now, at any rate, I'm not afraid."

He waited a moment. "Are you very sure?"

"Yes, for my mystification is greater at last than my delicacy. I don't know till I do know"—and she expressed this even with difficulty—"what it has been, all the while, that it was a question of, and what, consequently, all the while, we've been talking about."

"Ah, but why should you know?" the young man inquired. "I can understand your needing to, or somebody's needing to, if we were in a ply, or even, though in a less degree, if we were in a tile. But since, my poor child, we're only in the delicious muddle of life itself!"

"You may have all the plum of the pudding, and I nothing but a mouthful of cold suet?" Maud pushed back her chair; she had taken up her old gloves; but while she put them on she kept in view both her friend and her grievance. "I don't believe," she at last brought out, "that there is, or that there ever was, anything."

"Oh, oh, oh!" Bight laughed.

"There's nothing," she continued, "behind. There's no horror."

"You hold, by that," said Bight, "that the poor man's deed is all me? That does make it, you see, bad for me."

She got up and, there before him, finished smoothing her creased gloves. "Then we are—if there's such richness—in a ply."

"Well, we are not, at all events—so far as we ourselves are concerned—the spectators." And he also got up. "The spectators must look out for themselves."

"Evidently, poor things!" Maud sighed. And as he still stood as if there might be something for him to come from her, she made her attitude clear—which 420