Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/144

132 ranging vision, even though not other than baffled one too—out of the glimmering square of the window. Then, however, he recalled himself, slightly shook himself, and the next moment had faced about with a fresh dissimulation. "If you talk of her leaving him, and he himself comes in for all your bounty, what then is she going to live upon?"

"On her wits, he thinks and fears; on her beauty, on her audacity. Oh, it's a picture—!" Jane was now quite unshrinkingly able to report from her visitor. Traffle, morally fingering, as it were, the mystic medal under his shirt, was at least equally qualified, on his side, to gloom all yearningly at her; but she had meanwhile testified further to her consistent command of their position. "He believes her to be more than ever—not 'respectable.'"

"How, 'more than ever,' if respectable was what she was?"

"It was what she wasn't!" Jane returned.

He had a prodigious shrug—it almost eased him for the moment of half his impatience. "I understood that you told me a moment ago the contrary."

"Then you understood wrong. All I said was that he says she was—but that I don't believe him."

He wondered, following. "Then how does he come to describe her as less so?"

Jane straightened it out—Jane surpassed herself. "He doesn't describe her as less so than she 'was'—I only put her at that. He"—oh, she was candid and clear about it!—"simply puts her at less so than