Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/68

56 had somehow, it was true, suddenly been elbowed out of his path by richer ones; but he obeyed his old habit. "She can leave him, my dear; that's what she can do,—and not, you may well believe, to come back to us."

"If she will come I'll take her,—even now," said Jane Traffle; "and who can ask of me more than that?"

He slid about a little, sportively, on his polished floor, as if he would have liked to skate, while he vaguely, inaudibly hummed. "Our difficulty is that she doesn't ask the first blessed thing of us. We've been, you see, too stupid about her. Puddick doesn't say it, but he knows it,—that I felt. She feels what she is,—and so does he."

"What she is? She's an awful little person,"—and Mrs Traffle stated it with a cold finality she had never yet used.

"Well, then, that's what she feels!—even though it's probably not the name she employs in connection with it. She has tremendously the sense of life."

"That's bad," cried Jane, "when you haven't—not even feebly—the sense of decency."

"How do you know, my dear," he returned, "when you've never had it?" And then,as she but stared, since he couldn't mean she hadn't the sense of decency, he went on, really quite amazed at himself: "People must have both if possible, but if they can only have one, I'm not sure that that one, as we've had it,—not at all 'feebly,' as you say!—is the better of the two. What do we know about the sense