Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/100

88 I talk at my ease, and the appearances are such, I recognize, that it would be odd she shouldn't mind them. In short she had shown you how much she does mind them. I tell her," our friend pursued, "that we mustn't weigh appearances too much against realities—and that of those realities," he added, balancing again a little on his toes and clasping his waist with his hands, which at the same time just worked down the back of his waistcoat, "you must be having your full share." Traffle liked, as the effect of this, to see his visitor look at him harder; he felt how the ideal turn of their relation would be that he should show all the tact he was so incontestably showing, and yet at the same time not miss anything that would be interesting. "You see of course for yourself how little, after all, she knows Mora. She doesn't appreciate the light hand that you must have to have with her—and that, I take it," Sidney Traffle smiled, "is what you contend for with us."

"I don't contend for anything with you, sir," said Walter Puddick.

"Ah, but you do want to be let alone," his friend insisted.

The young man turned graver in proportion to this urbanity. "Mrs Traffle has closed my mouth."

"By laying on you, you mean, the absolute obligation to report her offer—?" That lady's representative continued to smile, but then it was that he yet began to see where fine freedom of thought—translated into act at least—would rather grotesquely