Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/104

96 'The less credit to you then to have—in two or three cases I recall—made such a fool of yourself. I, at all events—I don't mind your knowing,' Braddle went on—'am harder hit, far and away, than I've ever been. But I don't in the least pretend to place her or to have a free judgment about her. I've already—since we landed—had two letters from her, and I go down to-morrow to see her. That may assist me—it ought to—to make her out a little better. But I've a gruesome feeling that it won't!'

'Then how can I help you?' Chilver inquired, with just irritation enough to make him, the next moment—though his interlocutor, interestingly worried but really most inexpert, had no answer for the question—sorry to have shown it. 'If you've heard from her,' he continued, 'did she send me a message?'

'None whatever.'

'Nor say anything about me?'

'Not a word.'

'Ah!' said Henry Chilver, while their eyes again met with some insistence. He somehow liked Mrs. Damerel's silence after the hours he had spent with her; but his state of mind was again predominantly of not wanting Braddle to see in him any emotion. 'A woman may surely be called all right, it seems to me, when she's pretty and clever and good.'

'"Good"?' Braddle echoed. 'How do you know she's good?'

'Why, confound you, she's such a lady.'

'Isn't she?'—Braddle took it up with equal promptitude and inconsequence. Then he recovered himself. 'All the same, one has known ladies!'

'Yes, one has. But she's quite the best thing that, in the whole time, we've come across.'

'Oh, by a long shot. Think of those women on the ship. It's only that she's so poor,' Braddle added.

Chilver hesitated. 'Is she so awfully?'