Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/109

Rh I've asked her for details, but she only says she'll tell me "some day." Well, what day, don't you know? Finally she inherited a little money—she says from a distant cousin. I don't call that distant—setting her up. It isn't much, but it made the difference, and there she is. She says she's afraid of London; but I don't quite see in what sense. She heard about her place at Brighton from some "Western friends." But how can I go and ask them?'

'The Western friends?' said Chilver.

'No, the people of the house—about the other people. The place is rather beastly, but it seems all right. At any rate she likes it. If there's an awful hole on earth it's Brighton, but she thinks it "perfectly fascinating." Now isn't that a rum note? She's the most extraordinary mixture.'

Chilver had listened with an air of strained delicacy to this broken trickle of anguish, speaking to the point only when it appeared altogether to have ceased. 'Well, my dear man, what is it, may I ask in all sympathy, you would like me, in the circumstances, to do? Do you want me to sound her for you?'

'Don't be too excruciatingly funny,' Braddle after a moment replied.

'Well, then, clear the thing up.'

'But how?'

'By making her let you know the worst.'

'And by what means—if I don't ask her?'

'Simply by proposing.'

'Marriage?'

'Marriage, naturally.'

'You consider,' Braddle inquired, 'that that will infallibly make her speak?'

'Not infallibly, but probably.'

Braddle looked all round the room. 'But if it shouldn't?'

His friend took another turn about. 'Well—risk it!'