Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/72

 and tender. 'Too lovely,' he repeated and put up his monocle to look at her.

'Thank you,' she said, looking back at him unwaveringly. Her eyes were calm and bright. Against that firm and penetrating regard his jocularity, his attempt at insolent tenderness punctured and crumpled up. He averted his eyes, he let fall his eyeglass. It was a weapon he did not dare or know how to use—it made him look ridiculous. He was like horse-faced Mrs. Labadie flirting coquettishly with her fan.

I'd like to discuss the question in any case,' he said to Spiller, glad of any excuse to escape from those eyes. 'But I assure you I really can't Not the whole thousand, at any rate,' he added, feeling despairingly that he had been forced against his will to surrender.

'Molly!' shouted the professional drunkard.

Obediently she went and sat down beside him on the sofa.

'Well, Tom,' she said and laid her hand on his knee. 'How are you?'

'As I always am, when you're anywhere about,' answered the professional drunkard tragically: 'insane.' He put his arm round her shoulders and leaned towards her. 'Utterly insane.'

'I'd rather we didn't sit like this, you know.' She smiled at him; they looked at one another closely. Then Paxton withdrew his arm and leaned back in his corner of the sofa.

Looking at them, Gregory was suddenly convinced that they were lovers. We needs must love the lowest when we see it. All Molly's lovers were like that: ruffians.

He turned to Spiller. 'Shouldn't we go back to my rooms?' he suggested, interrupting him in the midst of a long explanatory discourse about the projected paper. 'It'll be quieter there and less stuffy.' Molly and Paxton, Molly and that drunken brute. Was it possible? It was