Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/73

Rh without news of her, that her visit was to Mr Puddick and his "set," and was likely to be of long duration, as he was "looking after her," and there were plenty of people in the set to help, and as she, above all, wanted nothing more; nothing more, of course, than her two hundred and seventy a year, the scant remainder of her mother's fortune, that she had come into the use of, under that battered lady's will, on her eighteenth birthday, and through which her admirers, every member of the set, no doubt, wouldn't have found her least admirable. Puddick wouldn't be paying for her, by the blessing of heaven,—that, Traffle recognised, would have been ground for anything; the case, rather, must be the other way round. She was "treating" the set, probably, root and branch,—magnificently; so no wonder she was having success and liking it. Didn't Jane recognise, therefore, how, in the light of this fact, almost any droll different situation—different from the common and less edifying turn of such affairs—might here prevail? He could imagine even a fantastic delicacy; not on the part of the set at large perhaps, but on that of a member or two.

What Jane most promptly recognised, she showed him in answer to this, was that, with the tone he had so extraordinarily begun to take on the subject, his choice of terms left her staring. Their ordeal would have to be different indeed from anything she had yet felt it, for it to affect her as droll, and Mora's behaviour to repudiate at every point and in some