Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/325

Rh unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn quarters.

There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy’s circle who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. “Everybody knows she married Fenton to provide for Ned,” some one let fall in the course of one of the smoking—room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had such difﬁculty in ﬁxing his attention; and the speaker’s matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers, were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the ﬁrst ﬂush of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether true or not, it had sufﬁcient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity on the persons [ 309 ]