Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/120

112 appeal enough, and could anything be imagined more ponderously clumsy, more tactless and even truculent, than to want to gouge out the bleeding details? The charming woman was, to Chilver's view, about of his own age—not altogether so young, therefore, as Braddle, which was doubtless a note, too, in the latter's embarrassment—and that evidently did give time for a certain quantity of more or less trying, of really complicating experience. There it practically was, this experience, in the character of her delicacy, in her kindly, witty, sensitive face, worn fine, too fine perhaps, but only to its increase of expression. She was neither a young fool nor an old one, assuredly; but if the intenser acquaintance with life had made the object of one's affection neither false nor hard, how could one, on the whole, since the story might be so interesting, wish it away? Mrs. Damerel's admission was so much evidence of her truth and her appeal so much evidence of her softness. She might easily have hated them both for guessing. She was at all events just faded enough to match the small assortment of Chilver's fatigued illusions—those that he had still, for occasions, in somewhat sceptical use, but that had lost their original violence of colour.

The second time he saw her alone he came back to what she had told him of Bertram Braddle. 'If he should succeed—as to what you spoke of, wherever he has gone—would your engagement come on again?'

Mrs. Damerel hesitated, but she smiled. 'Do you mean whether he'll be likely to wish it?'

'No,' said Chilver, with something of a blush; 'I mean whether you'll be.'

She still smiled. 'Dear, no. I consider, you know, that I gave him his chance.'

'That you seem to me certainly to have done. Everything between you, then, as I understand it, is at an end?'

'It's very good of you,' said Mrs. Damerel, 'to desire so much to understand it. But I never give,' she laughed, 'but one chance!'